


I Think You're Impossible (I hope you prove me wrong)

by Alsike



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: (for now) - Freeform, Alien Cultural Differences, Alien/Human Relationships, Canon Compliant, F/F, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-05-28 14:40:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 35,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15051365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alsike/pseuds/Alsike
Summary: Maggie Sawyer is looking forward, not back. She's left Nebraska for Gotham, is figuring out her job prospects, sleeping with as many girls as possible, and getting to know the alien community in the big city.A not-quite chance encounter with an alien who has lost her world and is struggling to find out if any part of it remains forces Maggie to remember just how much she has left behind.New city, new job, new friends, new apartment--clearly the only thing Maggie was missing was a jerk-face alien with a mystery to solve. Oh look. There she is.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The secret backstory to season 2 that you never knew you needed!
> 
> (Vol1 is all written, plan is for lazy updates when I can finish editing each chapter.)

The alien bar in one of the outer boroughs of Gotham was a cramped underground room that would have smelled like spilled beer if beer had been the drink of choice for aliens. Instead it smelled vaguely floral, like decaying rose petals. The important part, though, was the free wifi.

Maggie Sawyer had left Nebraska behind as quick as she could after graduating from NSCC with an AA in criminal justice. She'd worked her ass off to earn enough money for a bus ticket and two months rent on an apartment, and the day of graduation, she'd hightailed it out of there.

The cheapest bus ticket to a major city was to Gotham. The cheapest rent was in an alien heavy area.

Back in Nebraska, no one had seen an alien except for on the news. Based on the fact that no alien had chosen to move to Nebraska, Maggie thought aliens were probably pretty smart.

Every time she passed an alien on the street, she'd think of her dad at the breakfast table, newspaper spread out over the meal her mama had cooked him, scoffing at the news about migrants being detained in inhumane prisons, or illegal immigrant parents getting sent back to countries without their kids, or refugees being packed into a faulty rocket ship and shot into space, and saying: "How hard is it to come here legally or stay where you belong? I came here legally. I did it the right way. These  _ criminales _ , they are doing it wrong."

Fuck her dad.

So she'd taken the apartment with a mix of alien and Latin American neighbors, hung out at the alien bar, went a few blocks over to the less bougie gay bars to try her hand at no-strings hookups, and picked up shifts stocking groceries or cleaning office buildings to make rent. She was applying to police agencies outside of Gotham, but nothing was really panning out. Gotham City P. D. was the last one she’d ever apply to. Its death toll for rookies was way too high. Unsurprisingly, it was always hiring.

To keep her resume strong, she'd gotten her PI's license, and had kind of fallen into being the go-to PI for the local refugee alien community. She'd hang out with her laptop at the bar, and people would come to her, asking her to deal with small local crimes, or find lost family members, or give advice on how to manage court dates and lawyers in the human system. The alien community did everything they could to avoid the attention of the police. Gotham City had so much untouchable crime, the cops liked to take out their frustrations on 'vulnerable populations,' and there were no populations more vulnerable than ones that had no legal rights to even exist. Through these investigations, Maggie had found out a lot about how the alien refugee networks worked, how they were connected, who they relied on for defense or protection.

Shockingly, it wasn't Superman. The big guy and most high profile alien refugee paid lipservice to the problem, but he wasn't in on the loop.  _ Kryptonians _ , was the general consensus when Maggie asked why.  _ Bunch of uptight pricks. _

It was a Tuesday, around 2pm, and Maggie had brought her laptop and notebooks to her 'office' (okay, the bar). She didn't have any meetings lined up, so she was surfing the web for local agencies who might be taking rookie applications. The only one she saw was for guards at Arkham Asylum, which also had an appalling death rate and was -17 on her list.

A woman Maggie didn't know banged her way in through the door, skulking around the various tables as if she was looking for someone. Everyone in the bar went tense in a way that made Maggie’s ears prick up. Human authorities or unfriendly aliens were both likely to make trouble. Maggie slid back further into her booth and watched her from behind her computer, trying to see whether she’d be called on to intervene.

The first thing Maggie noticed about this woman was that she was an alien. This woman had no overt physical signs, but the way she moved--barely restrained power, springy and uncowering, it was definitely not 'female human standard.' That meant she wouldn’t have to play the human card to try to get unwanted authorities out of the bar. The second thing she noticed was that the woman was not used to spaces designed for humans. It was an alien bar, but it was in the middle of a human city, residing in a human style building. This woman cracked the doorhandle when she grasped it. The third thing Maggie noticed was that even in civvies, she was clearly someone used to giving orders.

As the woman passed by Maggie's table, it also became pretty clear that 'civvies' was a generous description. She was wearing a beaten up fedora and what looked like a black catsuit with a trenchcoat tied over the top. She looked like the most obvious cliche of someone trying to go undetected that Maggie had ever seen. It was hilarious, and Maggie totally would have laughed if the woman hadn't also looked like the sort to break your fingers as soon as look at you.

"Where is the investigator?" the alien demanded of the cowering bartender.

Maggie startled. The alien was looking for her? She waved. "Over here, babe. Come tell me your troubles."

The alien turned like a cat. Her eyes squinted, going odd, and making Maggie feel weirdly tingly, like the woman was looking right inside her. Then the woman paced across the bar and loomed over her. Maggie, at 5'3", was used to being loomed over, so she just tipped her chin up to look back at her. On a morphological basis, the woman was totally human-passing, but her pale eyes and hard cheekbones and unflinching stare were a little too 'squish the human' for comfort.

"You talk here? In public?"

It seemed like she wanted to talk. What this sort of alien wanted to talk about, Maggie was curious to know. She slid her chunky old laptop into her bag. Most of the bar was cowering away from the new arrival. She figured she'd spare them a bit of stress. "Come on. Let's walk and talk instead." She didn't really think being in public would stop this one from killing her if she decided to, but space and places to run would make Maggie more comfortable chatting. It would also let the rest of the bar breathe out.

The alien looked unimpressed, but slowly trailed Maggie out of the bar and down the street to the east side riverwalk.

"I'm Maggie Sawyer. What should I call you?"

"A--" the alien hesitated. "Ace."

Maggie nodded. "All right, Ace. What did you come looking for a PI for?"

Ace's mouth went tight and hard, and she looked away. "Why do you work for our kind, human?"

Maggie was pretty used to this question. She shrugged. "Not all humans feel at home on Earth. I figure it's something we've got in common."

Ace gave her a long curious look. "I have not yet decided if I'm interested in hiring someone, particularly a human."

"It doesn't matter. Buy me a drink and we'll call it payment for my time."

Ace frowned at her again, and they kept moving down the path, bicyclists and clumps of chattering tourists passing by. At one point they came upon some kids wrapping a tree in scarves and branch-warmers, items that looked like they'd been knitted for the tree. Ace stopped and stared at them for a long time. Maggie watched also.

"What is this? Why are the humans dressing the tree in garments?"

"Fucked if I know."

Ace gave her another puzzled look. "You don't know?"

Maggie shook her head. "Humans are weird. I mean, could you explain the reasoning behind everything your species did?"

That seemed to hit, because she went still and watched the kids until a cop came by and yelled at them, and they scattered. Maggie and her new companion walked a few more yards down to one of the overlooks and paused. The bridge to Bludhaven was visible in the distance, but the woman ignored it, and stared over the railing, down at the brown, polluted river. "I couldn't explain why they let my planet die."

"Oh." It wasn't a surprise, really. The aliens who came to earth were nearly all refugees from some disaster or other. It still was never pleasant to hear.

"My planet exploded."

"Shit. I'm sorry."

Ace glanced over her shoulder at Maggie, mouth quirking up oddly, eyes narrow, expression calculating. "I suppose the reasons are the same as why yours is dying. Petty greed, abdication of responsibility."

Was Maggie supposed to be surprised to find out that her planet was dying? She lived on it. She knew. "A system which values individual desire over the long term benefit of the community. Being lied to by people in authority."

The rippling bristle that ran through the alien was followed by a look; unsettling pale eyes were paired with a very human expression of shock.

Maggie leaned on the railing and sighed. "Same shit, different planet, right?"

". . . right."

They watched trash float by on the river for a few minutes.

When Ace spoke again, her voice was low and soft. "I was not on my planet at the time because I had been entrapped and imprisoned by my family for my efforts to stop the explosion."

Maggie stayed quiet.

"I don't know if they escaped."

"You want me to find them?"

"No," Ace snapped.

Maggie waited.

"You humans. You all think that family is important, when it is simply a way of insulating you from the brokenness of society. As long as the victim is not me, not my family, not--"

"I don't."

Ace stopped and scowled at her.

Maggie looked away, feeling the tension in her jaw, in her hands. She didn’t talk about this. She could make jokes about anything, the darkest parts of her life, but not this. But this time she wanted to say it. From this alien, at least, she could be sure she wouldn’t get pity.

"My family didn't throw me in prison, but they would have if they could. I don't talk to them. I don't want to see them. I don't care if I never see them again. But, if my hometown got shot up or something, I'd want to know if they were dead or not."

Ace didn't say anything for a long time. Then she nodded. "I want to know if they're dead or not."

#

After Maggie met Ace, her cases dried up. She'd seen it starting before that. Rumors and whispers were spreading through the community. The aliens drew together, closing off against outsiders. Maggie asked what was going on, if she could help, but she was refused over and over again. The aliens were still friendly, but they were scared. They kept their heads down and clammed up. Something was happening in the refugee communities, and a human interloper wasn't welcome.

She wanted to help. But she didn't know how. It was why she wanted to be a cop, she wanted to help. Finally, she sucked it up and applied for a rookie position at the GCPD. Sure, maybe they had a 50% death rate for rookies, but if you survived training and two probation years, you had a golden ticket to transfer out. Other departments liked GCPD vets. They could handle anything.

The problem was, training was run by the people who didn't transfer out immediately. They had found their niche in the GCPD, because they were corrupt, crazy, or the kind of lazy that meant they knew how to stay out of trouble and shuffle the work off to other people. Training was awful.

Just figuring out who was a sadist, and who was simply an asshole, who had good information, and who was a total bullshitter sucked up all her time and energy and attention. She was exhausted. So when Ace showed up again, Maggie wasn't expecting it at all.

Maggie was letting herself out of her apartment to go grocery shopping. It had been a long shit week at training, and she was out of almond milk and had nothing for dinner, and she was tired and a little deaf from target practice. So when Ace appeared behind her, like she'd just dropped out of the sky, Maggie nearly leapt out of her skin.

"Jesus fucking Christ!"

Ace frowned at her. She hadn't even made an effort to go incognito this time. No coat over her black . . . tactical suit? and without the fedora Maggie could see a streak of white in her hair that definitely set her off from any random black ops team member just showing up in the neighborhood. On that note, what the fuck was she doing in this neighborhood?

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

It had been  _ months.  _ And there was no reason for Ace to be here. For one, it was Maggie's apartment, not her PI office (the bar), two, Ace hadn't actually hired her to do anything, and three, Maggie  _ really _ hated being snuck up on.

"So you have discovered nothing?"

"What?" Maggie frowned at her. Her stomach rumbled, and she waved at Ace, gesturing her to follow as they headed down toward the shops. "You didn't hire me."

Ace's lips pressed together firmly.

"Also you told me nothing. Not your planet's name, the distinctive characteristics of your species, if there are any refugee leaders of your people--"

"I thought you were a detective, detective," Ace drawled in a very irritating way. "Detect."

Maggie glared at her. "Have you been watching Poirot or something? My little grey cells work just fine. Also, the showing up at my apartment is stalkery and you should stop that."

Ace shrugged. "You were there."

"And how did you know that?"

"Your heartbeat."

Maggie blinked. Okay, well, there was fact one about her species. Also, moving up to stalker level two. In the streetlight, Maggie's eyes fell on the odd sigil on the left breast of Ace's tac-suit. She frowned, memorizing the pattern of circles in the . . . very familiar cartouche shape. "What's that? Is it--"

Ace slapped her hand over the sigil so fast Maggie could swear the wind the movement made stung her face. "It is not your business."

"You really have no idea how to work with a PI, do you?" Maggie shook her head and noticed the thrift store was still open. It was nearing Halloween, so it was probably staying open late for parents and kids. "Come on."

"What?"

"If you're going to come grocery shopping with me, and just drop in to visit me like this, but don't want me to see your little crest, you need human-passing clothes. Let's just get you some jeans and a sweatshirt and we'll be good, 'kay?"

Ace scowled. "I have no intention of just dropping in further, if you have not discovered anything--"

"I know four things," Maggie said, leading the way into the shop and hurriedly throwing the first coat from the rack by the door at Ace so the tac-suit didn't look so obviously out of place. They headed to the blue section where jeans stretched from here to infinity. "First, in the past four years, there have been three exploded planets from which human-passing alien refugees have come to earth." She gave Ace's excessively long legs a frown and started looking at the bottoms to see which pairs had cuffs that dragged on the ground. "Second, one of those planets has since unexploded and the refugees mostly returned. I don't know either, some weird time loop thing."

She pulled six pairs of various waist sizes off the rack and passed them to Ace, who took them with a confused face. She also scrunched her nose as if they smelled. Thrift store stuff always smelled of thrift store. But loser aliens who didn't know how to dress themselves couldn't be choosers.

They passed through the shirt section and Maggie added some cheap t-shirts that looked like they'd fit well enough. (She might have gone a little small there, but she liked seeing girls in tight shirts, and Ace looked like she'd look nice in one. The tac suit was form fitting, but it did her no favors that being naked wouldn't do better.)

"Third, I've located the main refugee networks for the other two planets, and put out a call for open missing persons files."

Ace looked startled. Maggie glanced at her, added a pair of old, broken in combat boots to the pile and from down on the end of the row, a few hoodies. "Fourth, I figured out that you weren't from either of those planets, so I started collecting lists of exploded planets reaching further back." She thought she had some idea of which one it was now. She grabbed a Superman beanie from a bin and a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles with glass lenses from the sunglasses rack.

"There," Maggie steered her into a dressing room. "Get changed."

From inside, there were a few confused sounds.

"If it doesn't fit, throw it back out here!"

A pair of jeans hit her in the face. Maggie put them on the returns rack. Then, far quicker than she'd have expected, Ace stepped back out of the changing room. The jeans were a little large and slouched down her hips, crumpling over the top of the combat boots. The t-shirt was tight in all the right ways, and she had the black hoodie scrunched up over her elbows. The glasses perched awkwardly on the end of her nose and she handed Maggie back the Superman beanie.

"I won't wear this."

Maggie grinned and then handed over a plain grey one and one of her extra hair-elastics. Ace put her hair up, pulled the beanie on top, and she could pass for a grouchy lesbian hipster. Maggie thought she'd done well.

After paying (Maggie didn’t even bother asking if Ace had any human money. She could afford the $20 outlay), they left the thrift store, heading down the street to the bodega.

"So," Maggie said. "Kryptonian, eh?"

#


	2. Chapter 2

Ace had not been happy about being IDed as Kryptonian, but she tagged along on the grocery shopping expedition, and Maggie got the answers she needed to start asking better questions.

"Who are you looking for?"

"My sister," Ace said. "And my niece."

Maggie offered her food, which was received with the same grace as an offer of poison would have been, and then Ace left, still not having officially hired her, her new clothes in a heap on the couch.

After she was gone, Maggie stood out on her fire escape with a mug of tea and looked at the stars. She'd never been an astronomy nerd, but hanging out with aliens gave you a solid sense of the quadrants of the sky. They liked to say things like, follow the big dipper and swoop on up and out until you hit the horizon, that's where my home is-- _ was _ . She didn't know where Krypton was, not that it was there anymore, but she looked anyway. What route might Ace's sister and niece have taken to end up on this planet?

Did Maggie have a niece? Her brothers had both been irresponsible boyfriends. She wouldn't be surprised if they knocked up a girl or two. What were their kids like? Did they know they had an aunt Maggie? Maybe she was the dire secret warning.

_ Who's that girl in the pictures, daddy? _

_ Ah, she used to be my sister, but she was bad, so we sent her away. You better be a good girl, or we'll send you away too. _

Poor kids. Her brothers would be shit dads.

If Maggie had a kid, she'd . . . She'd do it right. Somehow. Not that she knew what that was. But she wouldn't be like her parents. She'd give her kid the kind of life where family meant something good. Where it meant . . . 

Family meant it didn't matter what you did. Want to fuck a girl? Decide to warn people of your planet’s impending doom? If you came home, you'd be safe there. Protected. And if you were in trouble, your family came looking. 

Family meant someone to hold you up when you couldn’t hold yourself.

Too bad her family had never been that for her.

Not that she was about to have kids any time soon. Relationships weren't her thing. The best she could manage lately was a hookup once in a blue moon. And unlike her brothers, no matter how much screwing around she did, she was unlikely to get a court-dated letter in the mail announcing her paternity and demanding child support.

But hell, hook up with enough aliens, and who knew?

#

A few weeks later, Maggie was cooking dinner when a loud bang came from her fire escape. Maggie dropped the spoon she was holding and dove for her gun. She had it trained on the window when the thing that had landed righted itself. She recognized the white streak of hair and the black tac-suit, and the adrenaline rushing in her veins dispersed, leaving only annoyance.

Maggie strode over to the window, checked both sides for surprises, then shoved it up.

"What the  _ fuck _ \--"

Ace was leaning against the railing, gripping hard enough to bend it out of shape. Blood slicked her face--her blood, from a split lip and a cut on her forehead. Maggie scanned the sky for pursuers, then gestured with her gun for Ace to get the fuck inside.

With far less grace than usual, Ace crawled through the window. Maggie shut it after her and turned the lock, not that it would make a difference if there were pissed off Kryptonians coming. She shut the blinds too, then turned on Ace.

"Okay,  _ now _ . What the fuck is going on? I didn't think you could get hurt."

Ace stood in the center of the kitchen, staring at the smear of her reflection in the oven's hood, touching her lip like she hadn't thought so either.

Wow. She  _ was _ hurt. Maggie went and got her med kit out of the bathroom, and wet a paper towel to clean the wounds with. "Hey," she said gently, approaching. "Come on, let me check that out."

"It's fine. I heal quickly," Ace said, stepping back from the threatening paper towel.

Maggie kept moving forward. "I'm sort of surprised that anything got through, with your bulletproof skin and all."

Ace kept backing up until she hit the arm of the couch. She flinched away as Maggie got too close, and then made a face like the flinch had hurt.

Maggie didn't touch her, not yet. She only had a slight sense of how strong Ace was, but from what she knew about Superman she was pretty sure if Ace didn't want to be touched, the unapproved toucher would be through the wall--the brick of the building, not just gentle drywall. She cajoled instead. "Quick healing or not, you don't want some dirt in there or anything. It would be a crime to scar your pretty face."

There was a moment of incomprehension, and then Ace gave her a look, her eyebrows doing some rather hilarious acrobatics. "I'm sure there are worse crimes," she said. Her tone had changed. She sounded present, not lost deep inside her head, focused on whatever mess she'd been running away from.

She stuck her chin out, offering her face for tending.

"A worse crime?" Maggie opened up the wound on her lip and cleaned it. A small fleck of debris--green and glowing?--came out. Almost immediately the wound sealed up and was only a faint red line. Maggie wrapped the green stone in a corner of the towel and made a mental note to put it in an evidence bag as soon as she had a chance. "Nah. It's gotta be a felony. Maybe a sin."

Ace winced and rubbed at her lower lip. Then she sank a little, as if exhaustion had finally caught up with her.

"What happened?"

Ace gave her that ‘none of your business' look she was so fond of.

Maggie stared her down. "If there are going to be angry aliens showing up on my doorstep, hunting you, I deserve to know." She didn't think anyone was coming though. Ace would probably be getting ready, not just leaning tiredly against her couch.

Ace huffed out a sigh. "There was a slight . . . _disagreement_ about leadership in my . . . _refugee_ _community_."

Maggie tried not to smile. Her inflection on those words said something a little different from the basic interpretation. She had mentioned something about being imprisoned for warning people about her planet's impending doom. And she’d been off-world when her planet exploded. This suggested that a key relevant word was ‘jailbreak.’ Maggie would bet that her 'refugee community' was, in fact, escaped criminals. Maggie's dad would be thrilled. Hanging out with actual criminal illegal aliens, just the fate he'd prophesied for his worthless queer daughter.

"I won. So it is no great problem. I'd simply had enough of them for the evening."

"All right," Maggie said. She'd always wanted friends who just dropped in. She should be careful what she wished for. "I'm cooking right now. Probably needs another half hour at least. So if you want to stay for dinner, you could, like, grab a shower or something? Get the blood off your face? Your clothes are in the drawer in the bottom of the linen closet--the one outside the bathroom. You can borrow anything you don't have."

Ace stared at her, confusion on her face. Maggie wasn't quite sure what Ace had expected of her, but then Maggie wasn't quite sure what the normal thing to do would be in this circumstance. She was just muddling along as best she could.

The confusion faded, replaced by an odd distance in Ace's eyes. She stared past Maggie, past the walls and the streets of the city as if X-ray vision could see into the past. "I haven't had a real bath since Krypton."

"You could run one if you want. The beans can cook another hour no problem."

Ace seemed startled by this suggestion. "I don't bathe alone."

Okay? Maggie tipped her head to the side, trying to look neutral. Was that a proposition? Had Ace thought Maggie had made an inappropriate suggestion?

"Bathing is for family."

_ Oh.  _ "I see." Kind of. It was a cultural thing, she supposed. There hadn't been any editorials in the Daily Planet about Superman's alien bathtub practices, but that didn't mean it wasn't a Kryptonian habit. It made sense. Bathing with someone was intimate--unlike showering with other people, which was just what you did at the gym. But it didn't have to be sexually intimate. There were other kinds of intimacy.

Maggie couldn't remember the last time she'd had a bath. After training she just stood in the shower until the increased bloodflow caused her sore muscles to start to heal. She'd never had a bath with company--not since she and her brothers were under five.

But now she was thinking about baths with better company. Probably not appropriate. Maggie patted Ace's arm and carefully stepped away. "You had a rough day. Shower if you want. Or just chill."

She headed back to the simmering beans. The apartment was starting to smell like her grandmother's place. She cried sometimes when making this. It would be good to not have to eat it alone.

_ Her abuela wouldn't have let her dad throw her out. If her abuela had been alive-- _ She'd have been shocked and disappointed, prayed a lot, told Maggie she needed to sit on her feelings or she would go to hell, but she didn't cut people out. The threat of hell after death was bad enough, she didn't need to put people through it while still alive.

Ace disappeared into the bathroom

When she came out again, hair wet, face clean of blood, in her t-shirt and jeans, bare feet, fumbling with the glasses in her hands, Maggie nearly froze. She kept lying to herself about why she was doing stuff for this weird alien. But really, Maggie was a giant homo, and this woman was gorgeous.

She had the sweatshirt with her as well, and she kept bringing it to her nose and smelling it, then frowning. Maggie wasn't sure why. She'd put everything through the wash so it shouldn't smell like thrift-store anymore.

As Maggie turned back to stir the beans and test the level of heat and the sourness the adobo chilis gave them, Ace came up behind her, then leaned down and sniffed her shirt, her wet hair falling onto Maggie's shoulder. Maggie recoiled in surprise and fell over. Before she tumbled to the floor, Ace's arm looped around her waist and held her upright.

Wound in an arm with the tensile strength of rebar, spoon hovering awkwardly between them, Maggie found herself transfixed by curious pale eyes.

"It smells like you," Ace said.

"I, ah, washed it with my stuff?"

Ace didn't respond, just kept looking at her, her head cocked if she was listening to something. Fuck. Probably her heartbeat. It was fucking racing.

"Good shower?"

Ace released her, stepping away, a frown darkening her forehead. "Better than camp."

That also jived with what Maggie had deduced. Before Ace’s adventure at the bar, must not have had much contact with humans. Her 'refugee camp' was probably somewhere isolated. "No hot water at camp?"

Ace cast her a slight smile. For a moment her eyes glowed. "I can always have hot water."

Okay. More powers. Cool.

Were all Kryptonians like Superman? Maggie wondered how many there were with Ace. A whole posse of criminal Supermans could make some serious wreckage if they got over all the infighting they seemed to be busy with.

Ace continued her sniffing exploration of the kitchen. Now that she'd identified Maggie-smell, she perused the simmering beans, the garlic on the cutting board, the red cabbage curing in vinegar. Then she returned to the cooking pot and considered it deeply. Something about her body language hinted at anticipation.

Maggie tested the beans again and started getting out bowls. "My grandmother used to cook this kind of thing on Sundays. Well, she'd start it Saturday night, and then it would just be on the stove until we all got back from church in the morning. By then, all the kids would be starving, and we'd tear into it. It would start out as this giant pot, and by the time we were done, there would barely be scrapings left. One time I didn't just wolf it all down. It had been a shitty week and dad had whupped me for it, though it wasn't my fault. And my  _ abuela _ saw that I hadn’t finished and took me aside and told me that if I wasn't going to eat, I didn't love her."

Shit. What was she saying? She could feel Ace's eyes on her as if they were lasers boring into her neck (only that would probably hurt a lot more). She didn't  _ talk _ to people like this. But Ace said so little, it was like Maggie had to fill the silence. She didn't look over to see Ace’s reaction. She just started ladling the black beans into bowls.

"My family didn't say I love you; they didn't do a lot of things that they could have to show it. But this was my grandmother's love, and I paid it back by eating up." She laughed and turned, handing Ace the second bowl. "Making it for myself isn't really the same, especially once I made it vegetarian, but it still tastes like someone loves me, even if that's not true."

Well, that was an overshare.

Ace was staring at her like she was a bomb about to go off.

Maggie sat down at the counter, shoved the cabbage salad over towards the opposite seat and picked up her spoon. She watched out of the corner of her eye as Ace finally stopped looking at her like she was an explosive and moved to the other stool. She prodded the beans suspiciously and then scooped up a spoonful. She ate it.

They ate silently, pushing the cabbage back and forth. Maggie thought of turning to business, but how long could she stretch 'nope, still no sign of any refugees from Krypton. Have you asked the big guy? But I kinda suspect from your reaction to his hat that the discussion wouldn't go too well.' So she said nothing.

"My sister was always angry with me," Ace said, unexpectedly. "I was not . . . kind to her reputation. But when my niece was given to her, she asked me, particularly, to come meet her."

Hearing that hurt, oddly, in Maggie's gut. Her brothers wouldn't think of asking her, and she wouldn't think of asking them, probably even if she'd never been thrown out. But Ace--it seemed--had a different sort of relationship with her sister than Maggie did with her brothers. She couldn't say 'better'. Nothing that ended with prison and exploding planets was better.

"She was so small. And my sister was . . . bemused, really. As if she still wasn't certain why she had a small child in her care, as if on extraction day she had expected to become someone else, a parent, but was still just herself. We bathed then. The three of us. It felt as if no matter what troubles we had had before, being here, with each other now, this connection would carry through." She poked at the beans with her spoon. "It didn't. It was just a symbolic gesture. It didn't mean anything."

Ah. Ace wasn't just sharing in return. She was telling Maggie she was an idiot for feeling things. Great.

But Maggie wasn't the one who hated the people she lived with so much she'd shown up at some random human's house to spend the evening.

She was just the one who'd invited the alien to stay for dinner.

"Even if only for selfish reasons, I thought-- I thought that my sister would make the decision to save herself. Or at least Kara." A hesitance. Her mouth tightened. "At least Kara."

She looked down into the bowl and scowled, as if embarrassed.

Now it felt fair.

"I'll keep looking," Maggie said.

The corners of Ace's mouth quirked down into a frown. "I haven't hired you. Weren't you complaining about that before?"

Maggie shrugged. "A favor for a friend?"

Ace froze.

Too soon for the 'f' word? "Also, you can't hire me. I have a job now. It's against the rules for me to be a cop and a PI at the same time. Conflict of interest. So I suppose you'd better earn my friendliness by being charming." Maggie waved her hand. "Go on, charm me."

Ace flicked a piece of cabbage at her face.

Maggie dodged it, then raised an eyebrow. "So charming."

Tension defused, they continued eating.

Though she ate at least three times as much, Ace finished when she did, and Maggie took the bowls, going over to the sink. She threw her a tupperware. "Put the leftovers in here. You like it?"

"It was . . . palatable," Ace said, her voice a dismissive drawl.

"You're a dick."

That got Maggie a sly smile, and verification that Ace was, indeed, being a dick on purpose. It was unfortunate that Maggie found that attractive.

When Maggie went to put the leftovers away after Ace had emptied the pot and then mooched off to the living room, she lifted the container and noticed that it was quite a bit lighter than she'd expected.

Palatable indeed.

#

Later, in her head, Maggie would call it the weirdest non-date ever. Ace seemed reluctant to head back to camp, but also useless at providing entertainment that didn't involve wandering around Maggie's apartment and scowling at all the human things. Maggie decided to not let her loose on the mango sorbet hidden in her freezer, and instead directed her to the couch and put on  _ Die Hard _ .

"I am not interested in what passes for entertainment here," Ace said. But it took about five minutes for her to pull her feet up onto the couch, curling up like a cat, and lean forward to watch more carefully.

Maggie, who had seen it at least a hundred times (it was a Christmas tradition--one of the ones she'd worked out for herself, after she didn't have any family ones anymore) watched her watch it, enjoying the winces at the bare feet and broken glass, the sudden curiosity when a clever move was made. Ace asked questions every once in awhile. Maggie liked them. They showed an interest in humanity and the culture that had created this movie that she hadn't really expected.

"What is the range of that type of firearm?" "Is the experience of the police officer significantly different from his peers?" "What is the cultural significance of the holiday being discussed?" "The female isn't military guild, correct? Are there any females in the military guild on this planet?"

Maggie did her best to answer the questions, no bluster or defense. She wasn't trying to prove that humanity was worth adoring. It was what it was. Mostly shit, but able to do some creative parkour.

Each time Maggie said something dismissive about humanity, Ace would glance over, take her in, with eyes used to scanning for enemies and dissension in the ranks. Maggie didn't know quite how to read her expression. She kept on thinking about an interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah that she'd heard once, where, sure, some dude shows up and asks you to judge yourself--wanting you to say 'yes, I'm worth saving, and this is why.'--But that's rude, right? So you go, 'oh, no, not me, I'm not that great.' And then your whole city ends up blasted and everyone turns into salt.

Fallibility of God? Or the cost of lying for politeness?

Well, Maggie was never polite, so she didn't have to worry about that one.

Though it was getting late, she put on  _ True Lies _ next and laughed more at Ace's confused face than at the jokes. Ace fell asleep during  _ Romancing the Stone _ , and Maggie gently turned the volume down to a low rumble, then carefully climbed off the couch. The glasses were slipping awkwardly down Ace’s face, so Maggie took them off and folded them up.

There was an alien crashing in her apartment. Ex-military, possibly special ops, with a serious disdain for humans, a complete distrust of authority, and criminal companions who were challenging her leadership. She probably should be worried about that.

But she was beat, so she went to bed instead.

#

 


	3. I Would Give You My Body (But I'm Not Sure That You Want Me)

One thing Maggie had learned--okay, fine, not from being a PI, but from her marathon of all the Dashiell Hammett novels in high school--was that when a dame walked into your place of business, you didn't just go around investigating what she asked you to. That was how to end up a sucker. Background info included the dame.

In this case, the dame hadn't actually hired her. But she was interested.

She probably needed to get a life.

"So," she said to the barman. "Talk to me about Krypton."

The barman gave her a long sarcastic look. "You a tourist now?"

Maggie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah. I've read the interviews with the big guy. Nah. I was just wondering if any of your contacts had heard anything about other refugees."

"Kryptonians take care of their own. If there are any, they don't use our network."

Maggie nodded. "What about an outpost, mixed group, no contact with humans?"

The barman leaned forward on his elbows. "You mean trouble?"

"Yeah. That sounds right." Maggie smirked. It was a good new pet name for Ace.

The barman shook his head. "Look, all I've heard is that you don't want to tell them no about anything. They're rough. They've torn up a few camps."

Maggie nodded. She wasn't surprised by any of that. It was what had happened to everyone left behind on Krypton that made her wonder. Maybe the only refugee who escaped the planet was the big guy.

But that couldn't be the case. A whole planet couldn't just die with only one kid getting off. If one ship got off, others had to. Maybe they went somewhere besides Earth? Those networks were tough to get in contact with. But there had to be someone who wasn't a baby, wasn't a criminal imprisoned off world, who knew what the evacuation plans had been.

Still, it had been like thirty years.

"How long has trouble been around?"

"A few years? Three or so?" The barman leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. "Some people say they know which prison they came from. Fort Rozz, in the Phantom Zone. Time passes differently there, so some of these guys are horror stories from the old days, like if Jeffrey Dahmer and Charlie Manson showed up, young and healthy and ready to start up their old games."

That was fucking terrifying. Ace could handle herself, it was clear, but being locked up with people like that when you’d just been trying to save your planet . . . Had Ace done something bad enough with that goal to deserve it? She couldn’t think it, but what was too much when your whole planet was at stake? Sure, tie yourself to a reactor if you’re a buddhist. But self-immolation, assassination, bombing--sometimes going that far was necessary. One soul for a whole planet? What a small cost. "Time passes differently?" Maggie chewed on her lower lip. "What does that even mean?"

"You want an astrophysicist or a bartender?"

Maggie grinned. "You'll do. Is the Phantom Zone between Krypton and here?"

"Sometimes, depending on orbits and such."

Maggie stirred her drink. The math was starting to check out. Whenever Krypton had blown up in the objective timescale of the universe (ha), there was pretty good evidence that a trip from there, starting at the explosion, to here would disembark about thirty years ago. At least that was what the gossip-page editor Cat Grant speculated about the big guy's age. If he had missed the orbit of the Phantom Zone on his trajectory, but other refugees had gotten stuck in it, that would explain why he had appeared to be the only survivor.

If Ace had been in the Phantom Zone at the time, and hadn't come to earth until about three years ago, then it meant that despite the time effects, her group of criminals had managed to escape. If the Phantom Zone had released them, had it released other things? Escape pods? Debris from the explosion?

"Do you know anything about a sudden increase in meteor strikes or shooting stars maybe about three years ago?"

"Do I look like NASA?" The barman narrowed his eyes. "You mean the green rock, don't you. Seriously, my only cop friend, don't fuck with Superman. One way or another, if you do, I won't have any cop friends."

"Noted," Maggie saluted. "I'm not interested in the green rock," though the fragment of stone she'd taken out of Ace's lip suddenly made a lot more sense. "Just wondering if any more refugees came around then. Asking for a friend."

The barman shrugged. "It would be news to me."

She'd probably pushed that line of inquiry too far, but she understood a lot more now. If not where, at least she knew when to start looking for refugees.

As Maggie walked back towards her apartment, she looked up toward the skyline, wondering if she'd see anyone flying by. (It was too early for bat-spotting. On patrol she'd met a few of them though.)

What had happened when the prison refugees landed? How long had Ace known that Krypton was gone? How long had she been missing her family?

Would Maggie get an email one day from her aunt saying that her dad was dead? Would her aunt even remember to let her know?

Sometimes she thought about emailing her. Saying, hey, how are things? What was that recipe for the sage and butter beans you used to cook? But she didn't want to think about back then, about seeing her brothers in the halls of the school and not being allowed to speak to them, about the ways everyone had watched her. She’d known she couldn't afford to get suspended for fighting, known that some of the guys would wait for her on her way home, and she wouldn't start fights, but by God she would finish them.

Her aunt hadn't turned her away--her mom's sister, not her dad's--but she'd had her own life, and Maggie had fucked it up.

It was great how you could be pissed at someone for making you feel like a burden and also feel sick with guilt for having been such a burden all at the same time.

#

The evening had been going well in all of the ways Maggie liked them to go well. Girl in the red dress--fine, she'd forgotten her name about ten minutes after she'd picked her up at the club, but no one ever said Maggie was a  _ gentleman _ \--was smoking hot, with the classic eye-makeup Catwoman had brought back into vogue, and she was super good with her tongue which promised excellent things.

Maggie had brought the girl back to her place and they'd paused for a good ten minutes in the stairwell to make out before footsteps sounded coming down the steps from above them. Not wanting to be caught  _ in flagrante  _ by some phobe, Maggie tugged her up the last flight to her door. The girl's hands were unbuttoning her favorite tight jeans while Maggie fumbled with her keys, and when the door swung open, Maggie took her by the hip, guided her around until her back hit the clear foyer wall, and stepped in to capture her mouth again.

"Excuse me. Is this going to take long?"

Fuck.

The girl in the red dress froze completely. Maggie sighed and flicked on the light.

Ace was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, a narrow-eyed smirk on her face. "You can continue if you want. But it's not really my sort of entertainment."

Ace’s hair was wet from the shower, loose jeans and bare feet, tight t-shirt, open sweatshirt scrunched up to her elbows. She spoke dryly, but her eyes were sharp, intense.

Was it really not her sort of entertainment?

Maggie had two minds, she thought sometimes. One of them was useful for police work and only got her into trouble by being too much of a smartass. The other one was feral, sensation driven. It got her in trouble by wanting what it wanted just a little too much. When she went out, she let the feral one drive. It liked a few drinks; it liked girl-in-the-red-dress; it liked warmth and scent and the way skin felt and the way mouths clashed, and it wasn't picky.

The memory of the way Ace’s body could go from hard to soft filled her head. Maggie could make her go hard. Maggie could make her go soft. She scrounged for words that weren't,  _ come _ , or  _ please. _

"Made yourself at home, I see," Maggie managed.

Though the words sounded like the right ones, the way Ace kept looking at her made them feel wrong. She ignored girl-in-the-red dress, eyes flicking up from Maggie’s boots to her open jeans to her tight shirt, something darkly exposing about that gaze. The corner of her lips quirked up. She shrugged. "You were late."

And Ace was here, again. If she wanted information, Maggie didn’t really have much new to tell her. But if she wanted something else?

Maggie liked aliens. But she hadn’t fucked one yet.

A push at her chest reminded Maggie that she was probably the only one here on board for a threeway.

"Excuse me," the girl in the red dress said. "What is going on here? If you’ve got other plans, the night is young enough that I can get a better offer."

Maggie grit her teeth. The girl had been a sure thing until now. Ace's smirk spread wider, way too pleased that she was getting what she wanted. It reminded Maggie that Ace liked nothing more than being a dick, and expecting her to fulfill any promises she made with her eyes was not a good bet. "This is Ace, my . . . cousin. I am sure whatever she wants can wait until  _ tomorrow _ ."

Ace had probably never taken a hint in her life.

"Your cousin?" The girl gave Ace a once over and then Maggie another. Admittedly, that had been a terrible lie. "Right. Mix up your fuckbuddy scheduling?"

"No scheduling. She just drops in sometimes." Maggie wanted to growl it. "And if she needs something she can just as well drop in tomorrow. Okay?"

"I can wait until you're finished." Ace waved a hand vaguely. "I doubt it will take long."

Maggie saw the look on the girl-in-the-red-dress's face and groaned internally.

"Right," the girl said. "I'm out."

"Wait!" Maggie chased after as the girl stepped out of the apartment and turned toward the staircase. "Wait. Ah--"

The girl paused. She turned around. "Wait, who?"

Maggie racked her brain, "Ah, um. Katherine?" It was a reasonable guess for a white girl. There had been four Katherine's in her class in elementary school.

"Wrong. Do not pass go. Do not give me your phone number."

She strode into the stairwell and was gone.

"Fuck."

Maggie stomped back into her apartment and threw her keys onto the side table. She slammed her door and refastened her jeans. "Damn you. I was going to get laid tonight."

Ace snorted. "You humans and your carnal obsession."

"Says the alien who offered to watch. If you were so willing to wait, why couldn't you have made yourself scarce until she passed out?"

"If you knew I was waiting you would emerge more quickly.”

Maggie didn't believe for a second that she would have waited for Maggie to get off. "Why are you here at all? You've still failed to pay me anything and tonight was definitely not a successful attempt to win me over with charm. You can't just show up and order me around like you're some kind of feudal lord and I'm your retainer."

Ace sauntered toward her in a slow lazy way that made Maggie feel like she was some kind of prey. Maggie was not interested in feeling like prey. She didn't flinch. Ace looked down, her eyes narrow, her mouth just the slightest bit hard. "You will refuse me?"

"Easily," Maggie said, with more certainty than she felt. Ace radiated heat like the sun. That confident, competent ease was way too attractive. Regardless of how pissed she was, Maggie’s body was totally willing to forgo an apology and take it out in trade.

"You haven't even heard what I want yet." Ace was close now, close and sultry in a way that had to be intentional, didn’t it? Maggie waited for a brush of her hand on her waist, a lean she couldn’t take back, wanting just one sign that Ace wanted her, and wasn’t just being manipulative.

"Tell me." Maggie heard the suppressed judder in her own voice.

"If you're going to be so dismissive of my issues, prioritizing your own pleasure over them, perhaps you do not value my trust." On 'trust' her eyes flicked down to Maggie's rumpled shirt and refastened jeans, settled low on her hips.

"Perhaps the fact that you have repeatedly invaded my home, my privacy, and my life makes the fact that I trust you at all a miracle, and you should appreciate me more."

Maggie kept her chin up, her eyes on Ace's. The air between them felt like a magnetic field, a laser beam of purposefully misunderstood connection. If she pushed just hard enough, moved just right, she was sure Ace would take her by her hips and shove her up against the wall. Maggie didn’t think she could say no to that. Not tonight.

There was a slight shudder, a flicker, as if Ace moved and then moved back faster than Maggie could see. An expression--tight, uncomfortable, confused--crossed her face, and she stepped away.

"I need information. Some of my . . . companions have been disappearing, possibly at the hands of a black ops organization, and I am concerned they will locate our encampment. I would like to know if there is any governmental organization tasked with hunting the alien presence, and where their base might be."

It was like a wet cloth slapping her face. Ace wasn’t here for her. She was here for information. She was a little disgusted with herself for even entertaining the thought.  _ Don’t flatter yourself _ , she heard in her Mama’s voice. But she shoudn’t flatter Ace either, that jerk couldn’t pick a good thing if there was a neon light over it.

Maggie shook herself. She needed her normal brain back. "Wait, you want to find the base of this government organization . . . so you can take it out?"

Ace gave her a narrow sidelong look. "I heard you had the welfare of alien refugees at heart."

"There's a difference between helping out refugee communities and taking out a black ops organization." Maggie scowled. There was a sinking feeling in her gut. She’d wondered at the lengths Ace would go to save her planet. It seemed like she ought to be worried about the lengths she’d go to protect her enclave of prisoners. "I'm not against it, inherently. But it's stupid. You wreck them and suddenly there's evidence that aliens really are a menace and it's no longer black ops, it's Sentinels."

"What?"

Maggie waved her hand. "X-men reference."

Ace scrunched her nose, clearly not enlightened. "I take your point. We can engineer it to look like a prison break. I do not want to lead them back to my camp."

"So your guys that they captured--" If she just wanted her friends’ release, that was reasonable, right?

"Most left the camp on their own. Either due to specialized biological needs or because they prefer to work alone and are uninterested in working with us."

"Then why do you want them back?"

"I don't. The organization itself is a threat. We must be able to monitor it if not destroy it."

"Right." Maggie blew out a long breath. That was not the answer she’d wanted to hear. What Ace did, it wasn’t her responsibility. And if she’d learned anything being a cop in Gotham was that if you didn’t have the firepower to stop it, it probably wasn’t a crime. She wasn’t stopping Ace any time soon with her flimsy human muscles. But regardless, this was not something she wanted to be involved in. Vengeance coming down from the government because she was sticking her nose in where she didn't belong was very unappealing. She pushed back her hair from both sides of her face and shook her head. "I can't help you."

"Why not?"

"That's the kind of investigation that could get me into a lot of trouble."

"You're just squeamish that I might have to do what's necessary and rid myself of these pests."

Maggie stopped. Okay. Now she was sure she'd made the right call. She’d been a sucker to even imagine Ace was here because she found something about Maggie appealing. Maggie was useful, that was it. Ace didn’t even see her as human--well, maybe seeing her as human was the problem. Humans, the vermin infesting Earth, right? 

"Maybe I am squeamish. Maybe since I became a cop I'm a little more picky about who gets to 'get rid of pests.' I know that most of the people I work with are shitbags and that Gotham would be better off without them, but people who use the term 'pests' aren't going to separate me from the other guys, no matter how good I am. Yeah, black ops guys hunting down aliens is shitty, but you don't know who's working with them, you don't know what pressure they're using to keep those people there, you  _ don't know them _ ."

"If they are being forced to commit violations against sentient persons, then death is freedom."

Maggie stared at Ace. Could she even hear herself when she said shit like that? Who was she listening to that these phrases made sense to her?

"No," Maggie said. "Freedom's freedom. Death is death. Did death free your sister from her mistakes? Must have been shitty to try to navigate between her family and her planet, to realize she was wrong, to face her end, her guilt, her culpability. Is she better off now?"

The slow stillness that settled over Ace, the way her eyes turned to ice, the strain in her fists so fierce that if they had been holding coal it would have become diamond, made it clear Maggie had scored a hit.

"It's better she's dead, isn't it? Because all of that shit's gone now. Doesn't matter that she can't make up for it, can't say she's sorry, can't defend her reputation, because nothing matters to her anymore. Not even you."

So quickly it was only a breeze against her face, Maggie felt hands lock on her shoulders, her throat, squeeze, just for a moment, but tight enough to bruise, and then Ace was gone, clothes in a heap on the couch, the sound of the window slamming shut reverberating through the apartment.

Maggie sank to her knees and put her hands on the floor, trying to breathe through her straining lungs and wildly racing heart. Even being a Gotham cop, that was the closest she'd ever gotten to being killed. She'd baited the tiger, and that had nearly been it. 

#

In the next few months, through the humid and foul-smelling Gotham summer, Maggie transitioned from rookie cop to survivor. Surviving should have been a cause to celebrate, but Maggie wasn’t celebrating.

Gotham was a shithole.

The shittiest part was how orders came down from on high. Don't pursue this, focus on that. Maggie had spent the whole day evicting people from a tenement that the mayor wanted torn down. She had three murders on her desk, but they were linked to the mob, so her partner had gone down to the bar to talk to Tony, and in under 24 hours the payoff would show up. Then they'd file them nicely, 'unsolved,' and that would be fucking that.

Maggie knew that taking on the mob was stupid, that disobeying the mayor would get her fired. But this wasn't why she'd wanted to be a cop.

This wasn't who she'd wanted to be at all.

She picked up a cheapass bottle of Jack on the way home. Taking advantage of the cop's ability to ignore the law without repercussion, but bitter about it, she'd opened it in the bag and drank a good portion while walking. She stumbled into her apartment, didn't turn on her lights, and bumped straight into a body.

" _ Jesus fuck goddammit who are you get out of my fucking house! _ " She had her gun out, her whiskey tucked protectively in her arm. She saw motion and shot, just as Ace flicked on the light.

As if it were nothing, Ace caught the bullet and crushed it.

_ Ace _ .

"You broke into my house?" Maggie heard her own voice, embarrassingly shrill, but what with the liquor and the panic, she really didn't have any control over that. It had been more of a gesture than anything, but after last time, she’d gotten heavy-duty locks on all her windows. It was basic caution for living in Gotham anyway.

Ace set down the bullet on her side table. "It wasn't difficult."

"Of course it wasn't difficult! You're--  _ you _ . No wonder there was all of that grouching about whether the big guy would just walk into safes. Is a window broken? Is there a hole in my wall somewhere? And fuck you. It's my house. I don’t want you crashing on my sofa and eating all my food!"

Ace shrugged. Maggie was going to take that as a ‘you might want to restock your fridge.’ Maggie hated this; she hated the way Ace snuck up on her, and the way the memory of her hands on her throat made panic flood through her like she might die from over-excited hummingbird-heart. Why the fuck was Ace here, like she hadn't tried to kill Maggie before she thought better of it, here like she hadn't asked Maggie to be complicit in the murder of a bunch of humans, here like she hadn't looked at Maggie like she wanted her and then seemed disgusted with herself like so many people had before? And Maggie was disgusted with herself for even caring about that last one.

"Get out! I don't want you here right now!" She had plans for the night. She was going to drink herself sick and hate herself. They were really compelling plans.

Ace didn't move. She just stood there, watching her, with her unsettlingly pale eyes and hard, contemplating face.

"Don't judge me!"

Her eyebrow rose. It just pissed Maggie off more. "You come here and you think that we humans are fucking it all up, because your people did, and you're right. You're right. Your whole planet died because you fucked up, but fuck, what I wouldn't give for an asteroid strike taking out Gotham right now. You think that we could fix it, that if we weren't all lazy fucking idiots, we could do something about all of this shit. And the fact that we're not doing anything makes us worthless. But you’re worthless too! You tried, but your planet is still dead! And if I tried, if I tried even once today I'd be out of a fucking job and no one would be any better off! Not one of those families I sent to the shelter today would be any better off, so fuck you! Don't judge me for this. Just get out and let me hate myself in peace!"

The act of attempting to shove a Kryptonian towards the window was almost hilariously futile. But she tried. She shoved and pushed and when that didn't do anything, she started to throw punches. It was like punching a heavy bag, except the heavy bag had a frame of steel. She slammed her fists into Ace, feeling her knuckles begin to bruise, her joints straining, and nothing even bent.  _ Nothing _ . Nothing she did made any difference at all.

She was crying now, and that made everything worse. She didn't want to cry in front of Ace. She didn't cry in front of anyone. She hadn't since she was fifteen and fuck everyone who had tried to make her.

But she was crying now.

The next punch she threw landed in a forgiving palm. The hand gripped her wrist and did not let her draw it back. She struck with the other one, it too was caught. She yelled, dragging at the grips, fighting them. She fought until she was sweaty and exhausted, but Ace didn't let go.

"Stop it! Let me hit you!"

"You are damaging your hands."

"I don't care.  _ I don't care _ ." But now she was sobbing, and this wasn't fair. She hated this. She hated everything.

She fell forward, against Ace, like she was a tree or a telephone pole or something else unyielding and ungiving but  stable, stable when Maggie was not. She could feel the moment of startlement, and then the sandbag went soft, and her hands were released. Arms looped around her shoulders, steady and warm, holding her in, stopping her from lashing out, at either Ace or herself.

Maggie didn't know how long they stood there, ten minutes, an hour? But at some point she had cried all of the strength out of her, and she was limp and weak, and Ace scooped her up like a child and carried her to the sofa. (The carrying had been very smooth, and Maggie wondered afterwards if she'd in fact flown her to the sofa. If so, she was pissed she'd been too out of it to remember more.)

Maggie didn't know how to take comfort from someone. She didn't know how to be held. She stayed limp, curling up into herself, too tired to try to get away. Weirdly, it was Ace who knew how to hold someone, tucking up Maggie's knees and putting Maggie's head under her chin, and being there, radiating heat and stillness and making herself soft, when she could be so hard.

It was late when Maggie finally started talking. Being held was embarrassing, and her hands throbbed, and she wanted to pull away, but Ace was made of steel even when she wasn't trying. Maggie tried to explain, to make her behavior something less hysterical and irrational.

Ace just stared off into the darkness. "There's a lot that needs to be fixed," she said.

How simple. As if one day everyone could just wake up seeing that and just fix it. Or if someone truly powerful could come down from on high and make them sort it out.

Did Ace think that was her?

"You think of us as toys, don't you? Earth is just a toy world you can play in."

Ace's fingertips traced a line over her cheek. She was quiet.

"I thought we would have more time," she said.

#

Maggie didn't remember falling asleep, but when she stirred she felt as if she must have been sleeping for quite some time. A hint of pale dawn was beginning to show through the windows. She felt Ace extracting herself, laying her down on the sofa and pulling a blanket over her. She heard something, a murmur in a language she didn't know. And then she felt a brush against her forehead. She'd stayed.

The window scraped up, and then down again, and Maggie blinked into the dim room, breathing out slowly.

She was gone, and that was good. You couldn’t live in this dying, miserable world if there was a super powerful murderous alien willing to hold you in her arms. You had to make your own way. You had to deal with it.

Maggie snuggled into the warm spot she’d left and took what little comfort Ace had left behind.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Maybe a month later Maggie got shot.

It was a whole thing. The caped crusaders were out in force, the GCPD were on the ground, and the unis were the front line. Maggie had never thought she'd die fighting ninjas, but Ra's Al fucking Ghul traveled with hordes of ninjas.

Also, friendly fire was a bullshit name. No matter who was doing the shooting, no bullets in your chest were ever friendly. It had been a shitshow. Even Superman had to come up from Metropolis to help out.

Maggie's room in the hospital was a little too close to the mental ward, and in Gotham, crazy wasn't the kind of non-neurotypical you got elsewhere. If you _weren't_ depressed and anxious in Gotham, you were probably sticking pins in other people's eyeballs or some other form of criminal insanity. No one actually had it together. So she checked herself out as soon as she was able.

Maggie hated being injured. She knew that she healed up pretty fast (not as fast as _some_ \--she remembered that cut on Ace's forehead sealing right over itself), but when it was hurting it was hard to believe it would ever heal. She was broken. She'd be broken forever.

But she was mobile enough that when Ra’s had been sent home and they were having a ball to honor the Everyday Heroes (Maggie glowered a little at that--dying with a throwing star in your neck didn't make you a hero, it just made you dead, and 'everyday' was a bit of a slap in the face) she was well enough to go. She grumped about it a bit; being called a hero for doing her fucking job was not a compliment, especially because she had to share the honor with a bunch of schmucks who just couldn't figure out a way to get out of the line of fire quick enough. But she dolled herself up--not much, nothing looked great with the sling--and went to the ball.

Superman was there, shaking the hand of every cop who came up to him. Maggie watched him for a long time. He looked nothing like Ace. He lacked the long lean lines and sculpted features and penetrating eyes. He was a jacked farmboy who smiled at everyone. For someone who had lost his entire planet, there was no shadow of sorrow behind his eyes, no fear that he'd lose this one too.

But of course, he was a hero. Why worry about losing your planet when you'd saved it so many times?

When was the danger big enough for him to step in, Maggie wondered. Would he feel responsible for the slow smog diseases, or the poverty and violence caused by flooding and displacement? How could he be so confident in his big burly strongman guise when the real enemy was selfishness and greed and turning a blind eye? He heard everything. Had he learned to tune out the tears of the helpless?

Maggie grit her teeth, then took a deep breath and got into line.

Superman smiled widely at her with his big dumb face; then he looked at her sling and it turned to sympathy. "Wounded in action?"

Maggie smiled. "Just a scratch." She shook his hand, feeling the strange tension in it that she felt in Ace's skin also. How could people who were bulletproof and superstrong have such gentle touches? "It's great to meet you. I've been excited to hear about your advocacy work for alien refugees."

"Thank you!"

"I think it's terrible how there is no way to attain legal status, even if you fit the definitions of an asylum seeker for an earthling. Do you think so?"

Superman nodded seriously, engaged and yet unmoved. "Yes, I do." He seemed about to elaborate but Maggie smiled and tipped her head and cut him off.

"Did you really speak to the director of the ACLU about opening a division for defending alien rights?"

"Yes, I did do that." He nodded agreeably, and Maggie spotted the slight glaze in his eyes as he started to tune out. She was pitching soft balls. He just had to swing.

"Was it you who relocated the other Kryptonians who came to earth three years ago?"

"Yes, it was," Superman said. Then he froze, replaying the last question in his head and running it by the secret-o-meter.

"That's good to know. Thank you for talking to me." Maggie shook his hand again and smiled, and walked away before he could think to grab her.

She ended up out on the balcony. Her arm hurt, but she didn't want to take any painkillers. They made her woozy and made it hard to think. Clearly she wasn't thinking all that well anyways. She'd manipulated Superman. _Superman._

Her deduction had been right. Three years ago, the Phantom Zone had let its prisoners go. Not just the actual criminal prisoners like Ace and her fellow jailbirds, but the second wave of refugees, the ones that followed the last son of Krypton but were just far enough behind to get trapped.

There were other refugees. She still didn't know where to find them or if they were Ace's family, but they existed.

Not that she’d probably ever get a chance to tell Ace about it.

Ace wasn’t someone anyone could call predictable, but after the night Maggie had fallen apart, she hadn’t been back. It had been long enough that Maggie sort of figured that was it. Whatever she’d wanted from Maggie that night, she hadn’t gotten it. And though Ace had been unexpectedly kind, no one wanted someone else’s messy feelings sprayed all over them. Ace wasn’t the sharing and caring sort. There was no surprise she was staying away.

Maybe it was good that Maggie would never have a chance to tell her. This kind of hope, coming so late, without any guarantee or assurance, it would just hurt more when it turned out to be false.

#

A week later, the Batman dropped down from the roof in front of her on her way home. Maggie paused on the street, holding her bag of groceries and feeling rather put out by this ambush. He growled through his voice manipulator at her, and Maggie clenched her fists under the bag, wishing she had her gun. Costumed vigilantes were popular among civilians, though in Gotham the flashy criminals had more of a following than the bats, but none of them had any qualms about fucking with cops, and she had no qualms fucking back.

"Who are you?" the Batman growled.

"Maggie Sawyer, GCPD," Maggie said, as flat and stubborn as he was.

"What interest do you have in Kryptonians?"

So the bat was Superman's enforcer. She'd been waiting for someone to be pissed at her for her little verbal dance at the gala. Made sense that the asshole vigilante did the dirty work for the farmboy. "I have a friend who's looking for her family. That's all."

The Batman crossed his arms, his cowl revealing nothing. "And why didn't your _friend_ come directly to Superman? I don't like liars."

So says the guy with a secret identity who makes a game of playing with the cops. "I don't know," Maggie said, not lying at all. "I assume there's some bad blood there."

The Batman scoffed.

"Not all refugees forget their homeland," Maggie said, her voice going sharp. Superman played the just-another-guy so well some people didn’t even believe he was an alien. "This country believes in assimilation, in the melting pot, in the supremacy of American Values, but we carry our pasts, our families, our old wounds with us. I may be third generation but I am still a fucking _chicano_ and if the big guy doesn't believe that Kryptonian is just as complex and difficult to navigate then he is fooling himself. Okay? So tell him thanks for letting me know that there _are_ other Kryptonian refugees. I was asking for a friend."

Maggie stomped past the Batman and let the street door to her apartment bang shut behind her.

Once inside she heaved out a breath and rubbed the space around her wound, grimacing to feel the rough gauze and swelling. It was time to take some drugs and go to bed, and it was really, _really,_ time to stop doing things for that alien woman.

Once was a favor, twice was a habit, and three times was a problem, but for one night where she hadn't had to hold herself up . . . Maggie wished she didn't like she owed her.

#

Trouble returned on a Tuesday. Maggie got a phone call from an unlisted number and answered in her gruffest, "Sawyer, GCPD," to hear the voice of the bartender from the alien bar she used to call her office.

"So, you were asking around about Kryptonian trouble a while back, weren't you? You want to come collect it?'

Maggie held the phone for a moment, trying to sort out her feelings. “Sure,” she said, finally.

Maggie begged off of going out drinking with the cop guys who would either get angry when she kept beating them in darts or get angry when she reminded them she was a lesbian and didn't want to sleep with them. (She had nothing against with sleeping with people with penises, but the macho end of masculinity was definitely not included in her sexuality). She showed up at the alien bar fifteen minutes after her shift ended and immediately spotted the reason she'd been called.

Ace was at the bar, a straw hat tipped low over her eyes, a loose linen shirt and jeans instead of her usual catsuit. It seemed her undercover fashion had improved. She lined up three shots of a glowing blue liquid, then she drank them, quick and precise, and snapped the glasses down on the counter with just enough force to send hairline fractures running through the surface of the bar.

Maggie let out a slow breath.

Ace had come to town but hadn’t come to her. So much for her hope that crying all over her hadn’t put Ace off.

From the faces of desperation the bartender was making at her, Maggie suspected that Ace had still not grasped the concept of human money. More likely she'd grasped it just fine, but didn't see why it should apply to her.

Maggie threaded her hand through her hair, swallowed down the lump in her throat, and headed over to the bar.

Ace glanced over when she sat down and hunched further. "I heard you. I hoped I was wrong."

"Sorry to disappoint." Maggie called for two fingers of vodka and stared down into it like it was a crystal ball. How were you supposed to talk to someone when you’d been embarrassing and they were trying to avoid you? Ace requested another mysterious drink, and the bartender looked exhausted, but made it for her.

Ace stared down into it for a long time. Maggie watched her throat flex, even as her shoulders stayed stiff, not giving in to despair. Whatever this was, Maggie knew it had nothing to do with her.

"What are you doing here?"

Slowly, Ace let out a breath between her teeth. "I've been in bars like these on hundreds of planets."

Maggie tipped her head to regard her more carefully. In Ace's cooly sculpted face, she could see echoes of those worlds.

"Nothing about me has changed. But I look at my reflection and I don't know who I am." Her words were sharp, definite.

Maggie looked down at her drink, then knocked it back.

"There are always things to _do._ " Ace sneered at the word, as if it disgusted her. "Petty arguments, food and water and safety. They seem to be enough for the others. But I am hollow, and their weight cracks the shell that remains. I am not myself, because everything that once made me up is gone."

Ace got poetic when she was drunk, it seemed. Pretty words for sad thoughts. Maggie gestured for another vodka. Ace had sealed her lips together, a fierce scowl on her face, as if she had said too much.

The second drink went down easy. Maggie puffed air out between her lips. "My high school had just under three hundred kids. At schools like that, you know everyone, and everyone knows you. You stick with your group, bus kids, farm kids, trailer kids. We weren't trailer kids, but we weren't townies either. Me and my brothers, we were brown and kind of dumb so we ended up with the trailer kids. Patched up coats, oversized boots; chapped lips and runny noses. My parents worked hard to keep us clean, made go to church, and the rest of it. They didn't want us hanging out with the trailer kids. The trailer kids didn't really want to hang out with us either. But they were easier to hang out with than the lock-step friend groups of the townies. I had some friends, dweebs. I liked them. It felt weird though, because they were so poor, and I didn't understand why."

Maggie bit her lip.

"I was smarter than my brothers. Got onto math team--don't laugh. Started hanging out with some of the townies. My parents were stoked. Townies went to college. Townies got good jobs. Townies never got knocked up at fifteen. I dropped my trailer friends like hot potatoes. We'd never had anything in common really, except being outcasts--that's what I told myself.

"With all that good press, no wonder I got a crush on a townie girl. I don't know what I liked more, that she was cute or that she looked me in the eye. I didn't know what I was doing. I just _liked_ her. And everyone was like, oh, it's Valentine’s day, buy a rose, send a card. Trailer kids never bought roses. They didn't have money for that shit. So I didn't know how it worked. I knew some people bought roses for their friends and stuff. And I just . . . I wanted her to know I liked her, how much it meant to me that we were friends." Maggie shook her head. "Anyway, I was stupid, and townies were not as liberal as my dad complained they were. I thought about it over and over. Did I scare her? Did I fuck up her worldview, make her feel threatened? This kid she was being nice to, letting sleep in her bed, was secretly thinking of her in perverse sexual ways? I wasn't. I didn't even have a fucking clue, really, that sex could be involved. I just had feelings.

"My parents just wanted me to not be what I was, to fix myself, be the good girl. It wasn't a surprise that they reacted the way they did. But everyone else, that was the surprise. That something so minor, this one time I had an aching warmth in my chest when I looked at a girl, that I wanted to talk to her, to spend all my time with her, it meant that I was fucked up, so fucked up that they felt like they had a right to hate me. I didn't even get to kiss her. I didn't even have a chance to see what it was like, not for _years_."

Maggie breathed out again, hating talking about this. But once she started it was so hard to stop. And it was Ace. Ace never offered sympathy, at least she didn’t have to be afraid of that, the gentleness that made it seem okay to break, when it wasn’t. It was never okay to break. "You know what sucked even more? When I got booted, I didn't get booted back into the outcast clique. I didn't have a place with the trailer kids. All outcasts together, right? Nah. They'd felt weird about me and my brothers since we were kids because we were brown. They put up with us when we proved we were like them, that we could drink and shoot cans and do shit the way they did. But I wasn't like them anymore. I had tried to get out of their group and fallen, and none of them were going to catch me. Most of them would have always been shitty to the gay kid. But my friends, my dweebs, I think . . . they might have been skittish and confused at first, but if I'd come out to them, confided in them, they would have gotten over it. It would have been just another weird thing about me, but I would have been _theirs_. But I'd dropped them. So I didn't have anyone. And it was my own goddamn fault."

Ace was watching her, eyes pale, cool and contemplative.

Maggie shut her eyes. "All that shit, I carry it with me. I'm not going back to Nebraska. It didn't explode, but it's dead to me. All the people there are dead to me. I will cross the street to avoid them. But when I try to be someone who didn't grow up in Nebraska, who didn't have trailer park friends and didn't bleed and cry in a parking lot when some guys jumped me, who didn't hear my dad's voice condemning everything he didn't understand every day, who didn't walk into church and sit beside my aunt on Sunday but refuse to take communion because I knew I was a sinner and I wasn't going to repent--if I’m not that person, I'm not me. You said you’re hollow, that the weight of the everyday cracks you. I've felt that same fragility, when everything is forward momentum, trying to get good grades and fuck as many girls as possible and trying to be someone _new_ . The facade can't hold up. I need my shit to be who I am. I don't talk about it. But it's _my_ shit. It makes me me."

Maybe she hadn't realized that before, not really, not to put words around it. But she was so tired, trying to be SuperMaggie, badass cop, alien liaison, hot girl magnet. She was tired, trying to be Atlas with no firm place to stand.

Ace was watching her, mouth turned down. "What is a 'trailer'?"

Maggie blew a long breath out. Interspecies communication, always a crapshoot. Then she grinned and covered her face. Her chest warmed, hot enough that it felt like it was choking her. What had she been afraid of, that Ace pitied her? Pretended to care and then laugh at her behind her back? No. There was no dissembling about Ace. What you saw was what you got.

Ace didn't speak for a while, and when Maggie glanced over, she found herself being watched. Ace's eyes lingered on her fingers where they curled too tight around the shot glass.

"No one on our planet has twins," Ace said. "An impossibility. An aberration. _Disgusting_. But certain social statuses ameliorate less than acceptable situations. I suppose, in your parlance, my family was 'townies'?"

Maggie snorted. Some things didn't really translate.

"My twin sister and I belonged to one of the great clans. So people said nice things to our faces and ugly things behind our back. We responded to that in different ways. My sister was determined to make them give her the honors she deserved, be relentless in her pursuit of excellence. They could think what they liked but they would give her accolades regardless. I wasn't ever as subtle as her, though she could sometimes be as blunt as I was.

"One time she met her rival before their final exam for entry to the justice guild and told him that there was a secret code worked in to the questioning, and if he didn't answer the question hidden in the code, he'd fail. He spent so much time trying to solve the code that he didn't finish answering the last real question on the exam. He washed out of the program and she took his place and his mentor--the best in the guild." Ace ducked her head, a wide grin spreading across her face, and Maggie propped her chin on her hand and felt odd, seeing her obvious pride in her sister. Ace was gorgeous when she smiled. It changed her face entirely. The warmth in it felt like a glowing coal, guarded by a thick pane of glass. Maggie wanted to reach out and touch it, but knew her fingers would bounce off.

"Subtle as a knife in the back, really. But it worked. On my part, I fought the words head on. I confronted people. I told them their prejudice against us was stupid, and that worked as well as might be expected. In the end, I too did what Alura did. I put my head down and worked hard--in the military guild--to earn status where no one would question me. We had both had enough of questions."

Her mouth shifted, growing contemplative. "With the arrival of her daughter I felt-- I felt our world begin to change. We could not act solely offensively. We had to shield Kara, show her what could be, rather than simply how to fight what was. Clear the path, make the world into a beautiful place, one worthy of her."

A flex in Ace's throat, and a tension in her shoulders, and it was too clear what this was. Her niece might be dead. Was most likely dead. Whatever she'd wanted to do, she'd failed.

Maggie put a hand on her knee. Ace looked up, sharp, but limpid eyed. Her grey eyes glistened, had welled. "There are refugees," Maggie said, the words tumbling over each other, trying to get out too quickly. "I don't know where. But more came, three years ago, around when you did."

Ace went stiff. "You know this?"

Maggie bit back her words. There was something brittle in the way she spoke, as if she feared it being true. But of course she would fear this. Hope could break you. Resignation was resilient.

"Yes. I know."

Ace swallowed again, then looked a little green, as if perhaps the alien liquor had gotten to her. She started to stand, then lost her balance, falling and catching herself on the counter, putting her hand through it. " _Ngjawl_ ," she swore.

The bartender made a pleading sound, and Maggie swallowed, getting up and holding out her hand. "Come on. Lean on me, just don't grab too hard."

Ace shook her head, batting her hand away. “No. I have to-- I have to . . .” She tried to move to the door, seemed to forget if she was walking or flying half way through, and stumbled, barely catching herself on the wall, crunching craters into it.

“ _Ace_.” Maggie held out both her hands. There was nothing for Ace to do about the refugees, not yet.

Ace looked down at her own hands and then at Maggie, concern on her face, as if she didn't trust them not to break the flimsy human. Maggie stepped in and put an arm around her waist. Ace slumped a little, leaning on her shoulder, but not gripping too tight. Maggie walked her out of the bar and into the cool air of the street.

"You need a place to crash? My couch is open."

Ace made a little groan of nausea. They limped down the street toward Maggie's apartment.

"You were mixing your liquors, weren't you?"

Ace gave her a narrow-eyed glare, but then didn't look away. Her eyes lingered on Maggie's face. They reached a street light, and though the streets were empty, they stopped on the corner to wait for it to turn.

"Who are you?" Ace asked. Her voice was unusually soft.

Maggie looked back, finding an intense curiosity in her eyes. Who was she? Maggie wasn’t anyone. No one important.

But the question had weight. Why was she still helping? Why was she so invested in finding Ace’s refugees? Why did she say so much more to this alien than she ever said to anyone?

She felt raw under those eyes, her protective shell stripped off. "I think you might know better than anyone else."

Ace frowned, reaching up and taking a strand of Maggie's hair between her fingers, rubbing her thumb across the top, contemplating the texture of it. "Did your feelings for women truly get your ostracized from your entire community? Among humans? Who cannot seem to go ten minutes without flaunting their carnal and romantic obsessions? What sort of nonsense is that?"

Maggie raised an eyebrow. "You just told me that your whole planet believes _twins_ are an abomination."

Ace’s mouth twisted into a scowl. She drew back, keeping her own balance this time. "There are reasons for it. The Codex is venerated because it does not make mistakes. Twins are a mistake."

"You're not a fucking mistake!" Maggie didn't mean to snap it so loud. Her eyes stung. God-fucking-dammit. She'd heard those words too many times. "And neither am I."

Ace stood there, her face showing a puzzlement that was too close to understanding for Maggie to bear.

"No." Ace caught her cheek, then leaned down and bumped their foreheads together. It was a little too hard and Maggie thought she might get a bruise. "An aberration, perhaps. A marvel."

She stayed there, leaning against her, maintaining eye-contact, and though it felt terrifying to keep looking back, Maggie couldn't turn away.

Her hand rested against Maggie's chin, her thumb bumping up over her lower lip, pressing down momentarily. Maggie's breath caught.

"I am so tired of this seething, pointless war," she murmured. And then her mouth was on Maggie's.

Her forehead bump was too hard, but if anything her kiss was too soft, barely a brush of heat, that strange tension of bulletproof skin. The scent of metallic chamomile from the liquor she’d been drinking clouded like a haze around her as Maggie hissed in a breath and kissed her back.

Ace was hotter than a human, tasting sharp and strange. The pressure of her mouth made the kiss go slick and unsteady. Maggie caught her head, her fingers sinking deep into the hair knotted loosely on the back of Ace’s neck.

It was so strange, feeling that restrained power against her lips--a twist of her head, a turn, and there would be no way for Maggie to resist. She could only give in.

Ace’s hands cupped her face, turning her, sliding the heat of her mouth across Maggie’s upper lip, tasting her. Maggie knew how to do this, knew how to take it back, so she did. Ace’s grip tightened, and then it was a clash, bruising and hot, and Maggie gasped into the kiss.

Ace drew away, a lazy, self-satisfied grin curling across her face. Maggie’s face was burning. She panted, holding onto Ace’s sleeve, trying to figure out if she should be embarrassed or aroused.

For a moment, with Ace--smug as a cat--under the gold-hued streetlight, it felt like a scene from a movie. The swell of heatstring-tugging music; the crummy scenery fading into soft-focus; a kiss becoming an enchantment. Maggie had never looked for that. Romance and magic weren’t real, and even if they were, why would Maggie deserve them? And yet here, kissing a drunk alien on a curb in a shithole of a city, it felt like magic, like something that could make all of the garbage she’d suffered worth it, that could make her feel like the whole world hadn’t gone to the dogs quite yet. But that feeling was a load of bullshit. A kiss was enough, being wanted was enough. It didn’t have to mean anything more.

Then, as if the level of alcohol in her bloodstream hit a lock and dropped ten feet in one go, Ace's expression flattened, surprise and confusion invading it. She gave Maggie a push, light for her, but enough to make Maggie stumble back into the wall of the nearest building. Then she flew up, away, and she was gone.

Maggie put a hand to her mouth, touched her swollen lips, and whistled out slowly.

Fuck.

#


	5. Chapter 5

On a chilly night, circling the few blocks that were her regular patrol, her partner having ducked into a pizzeria to warm up, Maggie fell into the policeman’s stroll. It was meditative, aware of her surroundings, but not looking around in the sharp way that put people on their guard. Neighborhood policing wasn’t really a thing in Gotham and the people were aware that if something really bad was going down, the cops would be just as likely to cower and run away as anyone. So no one interrupted her, and she didn’t bother giving citations to the guys sitting out smoking on their stairs for loitering like her partner would have. Even in her fingerless gloves, it was too cold to pull out a pen and write them up.

When Maggie had been twelve, she and her brothers had often gone out on nights like this. Bundling up, able to see their breath in the air, but not wanting to stay home when Dad was having a bad night. Rafe would drive them down to the lake and they’d pass around a thermos of hot chocolate, maybe with a shot of something in it, and plink tin cans off a stump with their bb guns. 

Her brothers let her come because she was a good shot, and didn’t make a face when there was too much whiskey in the cocoa. They let her come because she was their sister, and that had meant something. They told dirty jokes and talked about girls, and Maggie had focused on shooting and pretended that she wasn’t hanging on every word. 

They’d been the first people she’d told she wanted to be a cop. “Yeah?” Rafe had asked. “They’re gonna give you a lot of shit. Come on, let me see your fist, make sure you can punch out anyone who talks bad.” 

He got her ready to fight. She hadn’t been worried. Even if she was outclassed, her brothers would have her back.

On a night like this, she could remember that, and it still felt good.

Ace smiled when she talked about her sister. Maggie could smile when thinking about her brothers too.

Did it count as forgiving them if she was the one who reached out? Did they even realize they were the ones who needed to be forgiven?

#

Maggie was in the middle of her shower when she heard a loud bang from outside. Was that her window over the fire escape? Was that the glass cracking? 

Goddammit.

Used to alien visitors or not, she didn’t like walking into trouble unarmed, but she didn’t bring her gun into the bathroom. If it was Ace or Batman she probably didn’t need to shoot them, and if it wasn’t, rushing out into trouble wasn’t going to help. She took the time finishing washing her hair to gather herself, found a towel, and checked outside of her bathroom door. There was a long crack up her window. There were no obviously threatening invaders. There  _ was _ an Ace pacing lines across her floor.

Fuck. She was wearing a  _ towel _ .

“Hey,” she managed, like a teenager with a crush.

Ace spun, staring her down, and all of the unpleasantly bubbly nervous tension went as flat as three-day uncorked champagne.

The alien was stiff, arms held tight to her sides, jaw clenched. Long and lean in her tac suit, her hair loose around her face, she was wholly the soldier, not the woman who could still laugh at memories of her lost sister and make snide comments about human projectile weapon capabilities while curled up on her couch. 

Business? Unpleasant business, most likely.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" Maggie asked, tone flat.

Ace spoke. "I wanted to make certain there was no misunderstanding."

"Oh?" Now that was a surprise. Maggie herself was the unpleasant business. She had to be  _ dealt with. _ In another mood, Maggie might find this funny. The criminal alien refugee had come to let her down easy, as if Maggie had ever had expectations.

On top of that, it didn't look like it had been a good week for Ace. She had dirt smeared across her nose and her suit seemed a little worse for wear. Whatever was going on down at her  _ refugee camp _ , it wasn't peaceful. Was it so horrible to think that Maggie might be happy about a stupid drunk kiss that she had to leave an emergency situation to make sure ‘there was no misunderstanding’? Fuck her priorities.

"What did I misunderstand the last time we saw each other? Were you not quite as drunk as you seemed? Did you kiss me for any other reason besides academic curiosity? Do you have some clarification about the function of your baby making machine that you’d forgotten to explain?"

Ace looked affronted and also put-off by having been given an out. "It was curiosity. The human . . . fantasy, about a unified romantic and sexual bonding, it's . . . peculiar."

Maggie laughed, a little harshly. "Tell me about it."

Ace frowned. "On Krypton no one kisses on the mouth, except for very close family. But here--" 

Maggie didn’t care. She couldn’t care. She’d heard this enough times to not need the details. She’d heard it from her first girlfriend when she went back to guys. She’d heard it from the leader of the LGBT club at her community college who’d been so enthusiastic and flirty when Maggie had been volunteering to do all the work, and when finally Maggie had pressed the issue, she’d said ‘oh, I’m not that into Latin girls.’ She’d heard it from her fuckbuddy at the academy, who was happy banging her, but didn’t want a relationship. 

“I didn’t mean ‘tell me about it.’ I meant ‘I understand, and I don’t care.’ You can leave.”

Ace crossed her arms over her chest and scowled at Maggie. It wasn’t surprising that she didn’t like to be ordered around. But too bad. Maggie lifted her chin and met her eyes, just as stubborn.

Ace turned her head away and cursed in an unfamiliar language. “I don’t have time for this.”

Maggie gestured to her towel. “It’s not the most convenient time for me either. I didn’t need you to drop in to clear the air, or whatever. Making out on a street corner might have been a declaration of love in 50’s Hollywood, but it is just another Saturday night in Gotham.”

Ace scowled, jaw tight. “I didn’t want you to think--”

“That I  _ meant _ something to you?” Maggie huffed out an unamused laugh, and reached up, threading her fingers through her wet hair. “I’m not  _ stupid _ .” 

Usually, Ace, when not lounging, always seemed to be in arrested motion, like a low-frame rate animation, where you were aware of how much your eyes missed. But when Maggie glanced back, she was still. Her gaze lingered on where Maggie’s wet hair fell against her skin, droplets of water making a run for her cleavage. 

“Um,” said Maggie, crossing her arms over her chest and raising an eyebrow.

Ace jerked out of it, shaking her head as if to clear her mind. She looked flushed and a little pissed off. “Fine. If you’re satisfied--”

“No,” Maggie said, surprising herself.

Ace stopped, giving her a long suspicious look.

“I’m not satisfied. Tell me, what exactly were you thinking, coming here. And don’t give me any of that Kryptonian sexuality bullshit. You flew from, where, Nevada? Nowhere nearby, to stop into my apartment--and from the mess you made of my window, if wasn’t a party atmosphere you left--and do what? Make sure I _hadn’t_ _got the wrong impression_? Make sure I didn’t think I was somehow good enough to make demands on your time or your affection?”

“You’re an . . . adequate human. I don’t--”

Maggie laughed. Ace was adorable as always with the backhanded compliments. “Or were you scared?”

Ace crossed her arms, mouth pressing into a guarded line. “Of you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It reads like good old gay panic to me. To think I thought you were too mature and cosmopolitan for that.” Maggie smirked. “Or is it just the sex that freaks you out? I know you Kryptonians don’t have time for the human  _ carnal obsession _ . Sucks to know you’re susceptible too.”

“You have  _ no _ understanding of my thoughts or my culture,” Ace snapped back. "I’m no stranger to sexual behavior. I've just never found much satisfaction in it. Those who let their bodies meet with no formal excuse--what pleasure is there in that? I don’t understand your species. I don’t understand your obsession with romantic bonding, how you value it more than even your planet’s future, or how--"

Maggie tipped her head to the side and smiled. She let her hand unflex on the towel. Before she could blink, Ace was in front of her, holding her hand to her chest, keeping the towel up. 

"I told you I don’t have time for this,” she growled. 

Maggie put a hand over her mouth. "Shut up."

They were too close. Ace’s eyes were wide. There was no reason Ace had to let Maggie’s hand stay there, cupping her face, pressed up against her nose. Finally, she pulled it away.

"For someone who claims to know a lot about humanity, you really get it wrong when it comes to me."

Ace narrowed her eyes. "How so?"

"The first thing you ever accused me of was valuing family too highly. Guess what, I am well rid of mine. You say humans don't give a shit about their planet, well I'm  _ trying.  _ Humans think there's nothing more important than love and romance. That's not me. I don't do romance. And I don't do strings. I'm offering to show you what some people like about fucking. That's all."

Ace went still. “You’re what?”

Maggie swallowed. She hadn’t really planned to say that. But she had. And Ace was still looking at her like she didn’t want to look away even long enough to blink. Maggie leaned back against the wall, hitching up her towel, just a little. She wasn't prepared for this, hadn't armored up with eye-makeup and good clothes. Wet hair and bare legs made her sense of vulnerability heighten. How had she gotten here? Why was the thing she felt most frightened of suddenly that Ace would tell her no?

"Why would you offer me that?"

Maggie stared at her for a long time, then sighed. She gestured helplessly up and down. "Because you're gorgeous and I'm really fucking queer?"

Ace made a scoffing sound, but the corner of her mouth quirked up. She eyed Maggie, brow furrowing slightly as if she was a problem Ace needed to solve. "But you're . . . flimsy."

"Oh, thanks. I bench 210, but thanks." Ace frowned. Maggie crossed her arms. "I think the real problem is that when you get distracted you break my shit. I would definitely appreciate it if you don't break me along with it. So, let’s consider  _ mindfulness _ as a mitigation strategy."

Ace's face scrunched up in confusion. "Sometimes I wonder if you're actually a competent speaker of your own language."

Maggie laughed. 

Ace’s head tipped to the side. She watched Maggie, gaze steady and direct, and she smiled. Maggie’s laugh cut off. She hadn’t expected that. She knew how it looked when she was wanted. But that-- that didn’t look like want.

Maggie wasn’t very good at being liked.

She reached out. Ace's hand came up. In the space between them, their fingertips met. 

"Close your eyes." Maggie had been entertaining a theory for a while. Kryptonians seemed to have heightened senses, laser vision, but also bulletproof skin. Superman could take a hit without any apparent pain. Had he adjusted to the oversensitivity, or did the bulletproof skin mute the ability of his nerves to accept sensation?

Ace gave her another suspicious look. She let her eyes close, and Maggie could almost hear her ears prick up. 

"I want you to focus,” Maggie said. “I know you can hear my heart."

"I can hear the blood pulsing through every vein, each pocket of your lung inflate, the proteins melting in acid in your--"

Maggie cut her off. Being the scary alien was a defense mechanism. She had enough of her own to recognize them. "No digestion talk. And shut up. I don't want you to listen. Feel instead. Feel my heartbeat through my fingertips."

Ace frowned at her, then shut her eyes again.

"I-- can't," Ace said.

"All right," Maggie tangled their fingers together and raised Ace's hand. Her stomach turned into a tight ball at this, and Ace flinched slightly as if she'd heard her heart rate increase. She resettled Ace's fingertips on the soft space under her jaw, the place she'd put her hands to choke. Ace could have snapped Maggie's neck with a moment of thoughtlessness, but even goaded and furious, she hadn't.

"Oh," Ace said, her voice unusually soft. "I can feel it here."

With touch, she was like a human. That made sense. If she felt as strongly as she heard or saw, she'd never want to touch anything. She'd never put her fist through anything, because even the brush against her skin would be overwhelming.

"If we do this," Maggie murmured, "You think about me. You focus on me the way you are right now, the whole time. Okay? Whatever we're doing, you feel my heartbeat through your skin. If you get distracted, you stop touching me. Immediately. Understand?"

Ace's fingers slid up her throat to her cheek. They dragged across her chin, barely brushing against her lower lip. "I understand."

Maggie reached out with the tip of her tongue and licked the pad of Ace's finger. Ace jerked back, releasing her, eyes going wide. Maggie smiled, that was a good sign. Get distracted? Hands come off.

"All right," Maggie swallowed. "If you want me--" she reached up to the top of her towel. "--have me."

She let the towel fall. It slipped down and landed with a wet thump on the floor. Ace’s eyes widened slightly, and she regarded her, her expression  _ complicated _ , her gaze steady, following the trickle of water flowing unsteadily from her hair, over her clavicle, down between her breasts, to pool momentarily in her navel.

As smooth as if she was settling down on wings, Ace knelt. Her fingers traced the line of Maggie's waist, sensing the pulse of her heart, and then Ace leaned in and placed her open mouth on Maggie's stomach, her tongue flickering out to lap up the water that had settled there.

Maggie let her head fall back at the sensation of a hot tongue rough against her skin and scooped up Ace’s hair, twisting it up off her neck and tangling her fingers in it. Fuck. What a first move. She should have known better than to go to bed with someone who only ever played chess.

#


	6. Chapter 6

The way Ace kissed felt significant in a way Maggie didn’t understand. On the mouth, it was rough and intent, responsive, almost as if she was learning there, studying what Maggie did and liked, sorting it and putting it into practice. But with Maggie naked on her bed, Ace's tac suit long gone--all bare skin, tangled hair and a rough mouth--she crawled over Maggie, planting kisses on her throat, her chest, the tip of her shoulder, and each one felt heavy with meaning in a language Maggie didn't know. 

Fucking someone for the first time was always a learning process, but this felt bigger than that, tangled up in gestures and charades, meaning lost in translation. 

When Ace got on her back, she went limp and still, dutifully passive, as if she was expecting to be used. The concept of turn taking didn’t come naturally. Ace seemed to want to match movement to movement, as if it was some kind of synchronized dance. Maggie wasn't against that, as a kink, but it made it difficult to figure out what Ace was actually into. That wasn’t coming across here. 

And the fact that Maggie was turned on enough that Ace probably wouldn’t even have to make an effort to wreck her meant that not being able to return the favor was a no-go. Maggie  _ might _ be a tad competitive when it came to sex.

She caught Ace's hands and held them away from her body.

"I'm going to totally interview you about Kryptonian sex practices some time, but right now, I don’t care what was normal for your culture, just tell me what  _ you _ like."

Ace was giving her that half-puzzled frowny face that meant she didn't entirely get the context of what Maggie was asking.

"Okay, I'll go first."

She moved Ace's hands to her breasts. "I like you spending time here. I like you going past when it feels like too much. If I'm still talking it's okay. If I shut up, you stop." She slid her hands down her sides to her hips. "This is good. I don't mind bruises here either.” She walked Ace's right hand between her legs. "I like getting fucked, but not  _ just _ getting fucked. Be creative." She slid her hand up, grinding it against her clit. "Diffuse pressure is good here." She moved her hand down, grimacing at how wet she was already. "I like penetration and getting stretched but not pounding." She went down farther. "Off limits until your strength is under control. Then we'll see."

Ace's eyes were wide, and her hands were easy to guide. Maggie dragged open the drawer in her bedside table. "If you're feeling industrious, I’ve got supplies."

She pulled out a bullet vibe and switched it on and pressed it against Ace's skin. Ace jerked back, startled. She opened one of Ace's hands and dripped some arnica oil into it. She rubbed her palm across it, and it warmed her hand. "It's about feeling. Sometimes you don't know what you like until you try." She scooped another bottle out of the drawer and tossed it to Ace. "Lube. Vegan and organic, totally edible."

"What?"

Maggie laughed. "Which part? Lube reduces friction, and this kind has no animal byproducts or synthetic pesticides in its production. It's still industrially manufactured, so it's not gonna stop the end of the world, but baby steps, you know. I like to make the effort with sex. The things you like should be sustainable, right?"

Ace looked from her to the bottle and then back again, her expression unreadable. She seemed to want to speak, but hesitated, then set down the bottle. "I'm sorry your planet is dying," she said, stiffly. It sounded different from when she mentioned it before, like she actually was trying to mean it, like for once, empathy had won out over anger. 

"Me too." Maggie rose up on her knees and put her hands on Ace's thighs. "Want to distract me from my species' impending doom for a little while?"

Ace gave her a narrow-eyed look, and then rolled her eyes. “Humans, the answer is always hedonism.”

Maggie walked her fingers up Ace’s chest, one step for each big word. “And sustainable intimate lubrication.”

Ace pulled her onto her lap and pressed her cheek against Maggie’s. From the touch, Maggie could tell that she was smiling.

“Now, you tell me what I get to touch.”

#

"Come on, tell me, tell me how this feels."

Ace was straddling her, on hands and knees, her breath coming rough and intense, her fingers clawing into the pillows. Maggie had traced her fingers down her stomach, hard as a fucking rock, and found her core. Ace was more responsive on top, less likely to slide into faintly obligatory grinding.

She could feel the steel of muscles under the movement of her fingers, releasing and tightening as she worked, and Ace started to shake her head. "No," she said, "No--"

Maggie reached up with her free hand, cupped the back of Ace's head, and brought it down to her chest. "You're okay. Hold onto the blanket. Relax. You're okay."

The hiss of breath Ace sucked in against her shoulder, the tearing sound from her blankets, the sharp shudder of her hips that nearly dislocated Maggie’s fingers, and then the weight of her body coming down, her heaving breaths in Maggie's ear . . .

Yeah. That was a success.

Limply post-orgasmic, Ace pressed her face against Maggie’s shoulder, and breathed out. She curled into Maggie, her hand rubbing lazy circles over Maggie’s side and belly. 

For someone all hard limbs and bulletproof skin, Ace was soft to lie against, her strength in neutral. Though careful to be gentle, she didn’t mind being heavy, and rolled half onto Maggie, squishing her down into the mattress. 

Maggie made a grumble of protest. “Wore you out, did I?”

A small chuckle came from Ace, and her hand was sliding down Maggie’s thigh. Then suddenly, Ace’s weight was gone and a firm grip on her leg had her being manhandled onto her front, her legs spread open. Ace’s knees kept them apart, and a firm hand pressed down on the small of Maggie’s back, holding her in place. "Not yet." Even her voice contained a smirk.

"Oh--  _ okay _ ," Maggie barely managed the word before fingers slid inside her. "Agh--" She was kind of spent. Ace's fingers retreated and then slid back in, chilled by lube, and  _ fuck _ . Maggie whimpered and grimaced at herself for it. A kiss on her shoulder blade, and a slow opening stretch, Ace spreading her fingers and then drawing them out while still open. Maggie whimpered again. Again, again, three fingers, four. Fuck, such long fingers. She tightened around them, feeling the press of each fingertip into her and gasped. “Okay, oh wow, okay.” 

Ace rubbed her lower back, encouraging her to relax. Then she started to pulse her fingers, faster than a vibe, like hummingbird wings. Maggie clung to the edge of the mattress in a deathgrip and fucking came.

#

When Maggie finally had enough energy to open her eyes, she found Ace watching her, eyes lidded, contemplative. She registered Maggie’s gaze and offered a sly almost-smile, just as a yawn overtook Maggie, and Maggie had no choice but to show off her tonsils. Ace’s smile widened. Maggie, recovering from the yawn, scrunched her nose at Ace, and Ace bared her teeth, fake biting at her nose. Then her lips were on Maggie’s, unexpectedly sweet.

A flood of poprocks in her chest, like astonishment, and Maggie kissed her back. It felt absurd, otherworldly.  _ How is this happening to me? _

It felt good. 

Maggie hadn't really realized just how long it had been since she'd felt good.

But lazy and sated, with Ace half sprawled on top of her, a possessive hand curling around her shoulder, her nose on Maggie’s temple, and her rough breath in Maggie’s ear, it almost felt like the base state of her life could be happiness.

#

The morning light was unpleasantly sharp against Maggie’s eyelids and she blinked them open, squinting to see Ace sitting up by the head of the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, wearing one of Maggie's black singlets. Her head was up, alert, staring through the wall, listening to something Maggie had no chance of hearing.

“Hey,” Maggie mumbled. “What is it? Is everything okay?”

"I shouldn't have come here."

Maggie had been residing in the soft hazy space where things were pretty good even with the lurking knowledge that once the endorphins wore off, she'd be in pain. But those words knocked her straight into the bad place.

She tried to move, then groaned, cupping her side and checking for cracked ribs. "Yeah if you didn't want to turn me into a walking bruise. Fuck."

Ace turned her head, startled, as if she hadn’t realized Maggie was awake. She frowned at her, a line appearing between her brows. Then she was up, moving at a blur, singlet off, tac-suit on, sex-wild hair fumbled up into a knot.

“ _ Hey _ ,” Maggie snapped when the window shot up. “Aren’t you even going to say bye?”

Ace stopped, unblurring to a freeze-frame. She looked back at Maggie, something drawn in her eyes, her back teeth clamped tight enough to make her jaw muscle flicker. "This isn't-- this wasn’t what I needed to be doing last night. I wasted time."

Maggie was always ready for a gut punch, but as tight as her abs were, the impact was harder than she was ready for. "Always charming," she spat. “It’s almost as if you didn’t come here for me.” What else had she expected? Selfish jerks were her type and Ace was not an exception to that. But over and over again she gave Ace chance after chance because she’d felt there was something there, something worth investigating. She hadn’t been wrong, but she hadn’t priced out the cost ahead of time and it felt like more than she could afford.

Ace shook her head, dismissing her with a brusque gesture. “Your company was pleasant, but insignificant.” Her gaze refocused on Maggie. Something odd and tight came over her face. “It will always be insignificant.”

Maggie couldn’t speak, couldn’t even breathe, after a blow that hard. She swallowed. “Get out of my apartment, you fucking alien.”

Ace stared at her for one more long moment. Then she turned and in a blink she was gone.

# 

Maggie was grouchy at work for the whole next week. Since everyone was grouchy at work, this mostly went unnoticed. There was a reason she only fucked queer people that she met in queer spaces. She didn't need morning-after freakouts in her life, and Ace hadn't even had the good grace to sneak out while she was asleep.

Ace was into her. She didn't hate herself enough to not be able to tell. She didn't know enough about Kryptonian sexual hangups to be able to predict what was going on in her head, but the smugness after she'd managed to get Maggie off, the desperation in the clench of her fingers in the sheets as she came, the unexpectedly gentle way she’d kissed her when they were both too tired to continue, it had meant something. Whatever drove her away wasn’t the sex. 

But when were morning-after freakouts ever about the sex?

Maggie had never put much store in the 'intimacy' part of sex. It seemed to her that people often mistook focus, creativity, and dedication for intimacy. She liked people who were responsible sex partners, who pulled their own weight. Ace had scored well on that metric, perhaps annoyingly well. Her clear enjoyment of making Maggie react, of leaning into her and tasting her skin, it all felt solidly like she was  _ there _ .  _ With her _ .

It had felt good. And then, when she wasn't there anymore, it felt terrible.

Maggie was old enough to know better than to put her emotional stability in the hands of a one night stand. It didn’t mean she couldn’t be pissed off.

Ace didn't come back.

Winter came and the holidays grew near. At night, Gotham was fucking cold, and it wasn't like Nebraska where you stayed indoors or in your car. Maggie didn't have a car. So she walked to the subway, walked to the corner bodega, walked to the liquor store with her knit cap pulled low over her ears and her cheap boots leaking. Snow turned to muddy slush almost instantly. People battled against the miserable weather, pretending that family and celebrations could bring light to the darkness. Ignore the freeze. Ignore the way old people died when their heat stopped working. Ignore the homeless in the slush. Ignore the pain inside. That's what everyone did.

A one night stand with a bad ending shouldn't have been so important to her. But  _ why _ had it gone bad? What had made Ace regret it?

It didn't matter.

And yet, Ace lingered in her head, like steel wool, rubbing up against sores she'd forgotten were there. Maggie meant so little to so many people. But some people had been there for her. Was it just her sense of her own insignificance that prevented her from reaching out, finding out if--just maybe--she’d left more of an impression than she’d thought? 

In the sleet, Maggie walked around and around in circles. Finally she bought a cheap Christmas Card from the dollar store and scribbled a line in it.

_ Hi Aunt Elena, _

_ Merry Christmas. Hope you're doing okay. _

_ Maggie. _

She sent it.

She wished she could stop herself from hoping she'd get one back.

#


	7. Chapter 7

In January, the news reported storms out in the Nevada area. Odd ones, that died down when any sort of surveillance gear came by--or so Maggie’s favorite alien conspiracy theory websites said. No one in Gotham cared, as it was over twenty thousand miles away, but Maggie kept an eye out for unexplained phenomena in empty desert spaces.

At the end of same week, a report came in, downtown, something had flown into an abandoned building, smashed a hole in it, and then hadn't come out the other side.

Maggie took a moment to reminisce about those good old days before she'd joined the police, when she still believed that someone was on top of this kind of thing. Surely the cops would go check it out right away. They must find out about it instantly, through cool surveillance measures, rather than a crackpot phoning in and screaming, and the secretary hanging up and ignoring it until the third one screamed the same thing. The foot-dragging with getting a squad together to check it out was second to none. Maggie volunteered herself and her partner, then waited around at the station in her bulletproof vest for forty minutes while they pulled three rookie uniforms off of patrol.

The building was in the neighborhood one over from Maggie's own. It was the only abandoned building for maybe two wards, and Maggie chewed her lip as her cruiser rolled up to the curb. The hole in it seemed about human-sized. But not everything human-sized was human.

Due to seniority, Maggie and her partner were left to guard the entrance. The fresh meat got to go inside.

After about ten minutes, Maggie made a move. "Hey, I think I heard something,” she said. “I'm going up.”

"Better you than me, icebox," her partner said and shooed her away with his gun.

Icebox was the GCPD word for someone ripe for the morgue.

Uncomfortable, Maggie headed up the stairs to the level where the ‘cannonball’ (as the crackpots called it) had crashed in. The rookie uniforms had headed toward ground zero, but Maggie had a look around and turned into the less precarious wing of the building. She found her way to an obscure door. It was closed. There were very few closed doors in this building. She opened it and stepped into an old meeting room with folding tables arranged around it.

She approached one of the tables and crouched down to peer under it.  _ Yup. _

"I wondered if it might be you."

Ace huddled under the table, arm cupped tight to her chest, and glowered at her.

"What's up?"

"Please leave."

Maggie chewed her lower lip. "My colleagues may be a bunch of useless cokeheads but they will check in here eventually. Are you okay with that?"

Ace shrunk into herself.

She looked like shit. Maggie flipped on her flashlight and played it over the alien. Bruises were coming out on her face. Blood oozed from the corner of her mouth. She was shaking slightly, holding her arm, and her teeth were clamped so tight it looked like she might strain her jaw. 

"Were you coming to me?"

Ace's eyes flicked over to her, then down. She looked completely exhausted. "I didn't know where else to go."

Well, fuck.

She’d suspected it was Ace from the start, and it was only logical that a divebomb into an abandoned building meant that the alien was a little out of control of her powers. But Maggie hadn’t thought Ace would be this hurt. She’d almost been looking forward to being asked for help, Ace asking her to get over how she’d been treated, and do her  _ another _ favor. Maggie was going to enjoy denying that request.  _ You think I’m going to do  _ anything _ for you after you called me a waste of time? Hell no. _

Only Ace really was hurt, and if the other cops found her she’d be in even more trouble. Practically, if she didn’t want to be complicit in the imprisonment and torture of extraterrestrials, she didn’t have a choice.

Maggie just wished she could deny the fact that hearing ‘I didn’t know where else to go’ made her feel a little special.

"Can you walk?"

" _ I can't fly _ ,"Ace hissed.

"I guessed. You look like you got hit by a truck. Can you walk?"

Ace nodded shortly.

"Come on." Maggie held out a hand. "Let’s get you somewhere safe."

She got Ace out from under the table and onto her feet. Ace wobbled and grabbed at Maggie's arm with what seemed like all her strength-- _ and didn't break it. _ She really was hurt. Maggie carefully helped her into her oversized GCPD jacket and let her lean on her shoulder. She felt . . . paper thin.

The stairs were no fun, but eventually Maggie got Ace down to the bottom floor. She put her in the hall just around the corner from the entrance and stuck her head out to see her partner. "Hey. It was nothing. Honestly, I don't think we're going to find anything. If those crackpot callers were right and it was a flying person, they're long gone."

Her partner shivered. "Fucking aliens. Give me the creeps."

Maggie bit her tongue. She checked her watch. Her partner had just finished his venti Starbucks before they headed out on this mission. Results should show right-- about--

Now.

Her partner glanced from side to side and gave her a sidelong look. "Can you hold down the fort for a bit? I'm dying for a whizz."

"No problem."

He ducked off down the alley, and Maggie grabbed Ace. She hustled her into the back of the cruiser, pushing her down and out of sight, right before her partner re-emerged, looking refreshed, and a little chilly.

"Want me to do a coffee run?" Maggie asked. The man was an addict.

He blew on his fingers. "Fuck yeah. Oh man, go to the one on 21st and get me a pumpkin spice macchiato, please; they still have the syrup. Almond milk, not soy. Two pumps."

Maggie tried not to snort. "Sure."

She got into the cruiser and drove away.

She parked a block down from her apartment and helped Ace out of the back seat. The alien was fading fast, and she leaned heavily on Maggie as they made their way to the building’s entrance. They had to stop on the steps to rest a few times, but they made it to her apartment door. Maggie walked Ace in and settled her on the couch.

Ace glanced around the apartment with a new uncertainty. Yep, Maggie didn't say, that was where you ran me into the wall because you weren't looking where you were going, that was where you left your tac suit when you got naked. Ace sagged into the couch cushions and shivered. Maggie got her a blanket.

"Let me see your arm, and then I need to get back to work."

"Your-- your militia is embarrassingly lazy and incompetent."

"I know. Arm."

Ace shifted and winced.

When Maggie got a clear look at her shoulder, she grimaced. That was ugly. It was bulging in the wrong place, the skin around it strained and taut. Dislocation. "Okay, babe. Lie down on your face."

Ace gave her another highly suspicious look. "You aren't a medic."

"I know. But I did work campus EMT for the two years I was there. I've . . . seen this done."

"My medic always administered analgesic before she put it back."

Oh, that was kind of a relief actually. "You've popped it out before."

Ace made a face, then nodded.

"Right. Well, sorry I don't have any morphine on hand, and don't know if it would kill you or not. So we're doing this au-naturál, okay? Deep breathing, do some kind of Kryptonian meditation practice or something."

Ace glowered more. "We were  _ scientists _ ."

"Hey, mind over matter. Proven fact." As she was talking, Maggie was shifting Ace forward onto the couch, and gently easing her arm down off the edge. She bent it at the elbow, and Ace let out a wavering little gasp. The couch wasn't high enough for it to hang free, so she let Ace's wrist rest on the ground, making sure the arm was going straight down, then she carefully climbed onto the couch, putting one leg over the small of her back and resting her weight on her hips to keep her down.

"Relax," Maggie murmured. "Think of a beach somewhere, or a hot bath. Or, you know, that moment after I made you come and before you decided to freak out on me." Just before Ace's back stiffened, Maggie framed the edges of her scapula and pushed. With an audible pop, her shoulder went back into place. Ace cried out, then gasped, letting her forehead fall onto the couch.

Maggie made gentle circles on the tortured area, until Ace whimpered and tried to roll away. A little too tender for massage. "All right? Anything else urgent?"

Ace peered up at her, relaxation making her face soft. She shook her head, her eyes starting to flutter shut.

"I'll be back soon." Maggie got up and made her move around so she didn't have any pressure on her shoulder and found herself tucking Ace in with the blanket. Okay. She gave the alien a pat on the head and started toward the door. What the fuck had been her partner's coffee order again?

"Maggie-Sawyer."

Maggie stopped. Ace never said her name. It sounded odd on her tongue, like one word.

"If they kill me, will you keep looking for-- for my sister?"

Maggie's hand tightened on the doorknob. Ace looked so exhausted, bruised and curled up under her extra blanket. She looked lonely. 

"Yeah," Maggie said softly. "I will."

#

Maggie kept an ear on the scanner for the rest of her shift. If aliens were coming to finish Ace off and destroy her apartment in the process, she'd rather stay well away. She also kept her eye on the clock. She needed to get home.

Her neighborhood seemed fine when she let herself back into the building and made her way up the stairs. Ace was still passed out on the couch, her hair messily spread out over her face, cradling her injured shoulder as she slept. Maggie tried to have fewer feelings. She started making dinner instead.

When the pasta water was boiling and the sauce was filling the room with scent, Maggie turned around and found eyes on her, watching from the couch in the living room.

"You're awake."

Ace gave her a wry little grimace as if that was obvious and hadn't needed to be said. But her face relaxed after that and she stayed quiet, just watching Maggie. Maggie watched her back for a bit, and then gave up and returned to cooking.

When everything was finished, Ace’s eyes were closed again. Maggie went over and sat on the couch, looking down at her. Carefully, with the tip of her finger, she stroked a strand of hair out of her face.

"Hey," she whispered. "You wanna eat?"

Ace's hands were tucked up under her chin, and one moved with slow human deliberateness to catch Maggie's finger. Slowly, she drew Maggie’s hand down to her mouth. Ace pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist. Then her eyes flicked up, again seeming to ask something, but Maggie didn't know what. Was that an apology, a request? She sighed and tangled their fingers together. It was so strange to feel completely safe doing so.

"Come on. I made extra for you."

Ace ate. She had more of a normal human appetite, it seemed, but kept taking more, and then frowning at the plate and rubbing her stomach as if she was annoyed that she couldn't devour all of it.

"Is your super-digestion also out of whack?" Maggie leaned on her hand and watched, faintly amused. But it really wasn’t funny that she’d been hurt so badly she couldn’t eat like normal. 

It wasn’t any funnier that the only place she’d thought to come was here. Didn’t she have other friends, other people--people that she hadn’t called ‘insignificant,’ hadn’t insulted then ignored?

Ace not having anyone else didn’t make Maggie special. It just made Ace a loser. And putting up with Ace after she’d treated Maggie like shit didn’t make Maggie an extra good person. It probably just meant she was also a loser.

"Are you going to tell me what happened? My mama taught me to be a good host, but, it wouldn't hurt to make yourself pleasant in exchange. You're a guest."

Ace shot her a narrow-eyed look over the pasta. Then she dropped her head, staring down at her plate and setting down her fork. There was a turtle-like hunch to her shoulders that said, very clearly, she didn’t want to talk.

Slowly, though, she sat back, un-hunching and rubbing her injured shoulder. She kept her eyes to the side, not looking at Maggie. And then she spoke. "I’ve been tired.” She shook her head and looked at her hands. "The power this planet gave me is excessive, and yet I still grew so tired."

That didn't sound like physical exhaustion. It sounded like depression. Maggie was tempted to lay hands on her, rub her shoulders, give her warmth. But having the temptation made her feel weak and stupid. She wished Ace hadn't come back. If she wasn't here, Maggie could pretend she was angry about the way she'd been treated. Seeing her face meant Maggie had to admit how much she'd wanted and how much not getting it still hurt.

"I made a mistake. Repeated mistakes. Leaving camp to search for my family, to come to see you, allowed forces to collude against me. Former allies sullied my reputation in my absence. The last time I came here, my enemies made their move. When I returned, I attempted to remedy the situation, but by then there was no recourse besides pitched battle." Something soft and sad and overwhelmed crossed Ace's face. "I did not expect to gain powers like this. And I did not expect what it would mean to lose them. They will find me, and, vulnerable, I will be an easy mark."

If that was why she’d left so abruptly-- No. Maggie clamped down on the trickle of pity in her stomach. Ace made her own choices. She’d chosen to come, and she’d chosen to be an asshole when she left. "Are they likely to find you soon?"

Ace shook her head. "My allies should still be keeping them busy. No one will have time to look for me until we have won or lost. But if this is all the strength I will ever have again--"

"You're hurt," Maggie said. "It sounds like it's been a tough few weeks. There's no reason to think you won't heal and get your powers back. Superman has fought crazy powerful people and disappeared before, but he's still flying around. Don't worry about that." Maybe Ace should worry about the long-term prospects of hanging around with a bunch of infighting criminals, but her poor life choices weren't Maggie's responsibility.

Ace breathed out, the exhaustion overwhelming her again. Maggie wondered if Ace would rather have no powers and just live a life passing as a human. She wouldn’t have the ability to do miraculous things but perhaps it would be worth not carrying the weight of not knowing how to use them to make this impossibly bad world better.

"Come on. You need a shower and then sleep. I don't know about Kryptonians, but sleep's the only thing that does shit for healing humans when they've pushed their body too far."

While Ace was in the shower, Maggie made up a bed on the couch. Probably, Ace should take her bed, because she was injured and Maggie could actually fit on the couch, but giving up her bed to someone who’d walked out on her after sex rankled.

It had been good, too. Maggie stared at the closed bathroom door and wished she didn’t have to think about it. It hadn’t been like first time sex with someone you were only casually attracted to. She wasn’t even the same species as Ace, and yet the way Ace had looked at her-- she’d felt attractive, felt wanted. That happened rarely enough that she valued it. She didn't like those feelings being taken away.

There was a sharp cry from inside the bathroom and Maggie was through the door, gun out, before she'd even thought about it. Ace, all wet and naked, cradled her arm, the shower still running. She glared at the interloper. Maggie re-holstered her gun.

"Uh, need help washing your hair?"

Ace nodded, damply suspicious.

Maggie rolled up her pants and stepped into the tub behind Ace. She worked her fingers into her hair, sensitive to the flinches when she caught a wound. There was gravel in it, and dried blood. It felt like surrender to admit it, but she didn’t have a choice about taking care of Ace, even if she’d thought about the alternative. People did shitty things, but you still took care of them when they were hurt.

Maggie swallowed. No, that wasn't totally true.  _ Family _ did shitty things, and you still took care of them when they were hurt. Or, at least, you were supposed to.

When she finished, Ace gave her a long look, but it was unreadable. Ace kept a lot of things to herself. What did this mean to her? Who else had washed Ace's hair? Her sister?

Once dressed in an oversized t-shirt (not quite as oversized on Ace as on Maggie) and sleep shorts, the bruising coming out sharply on her skin, Maggie sighed. "Come on." She shooed her into her bedroom and in the direction of her bed.

Ace froze at the door. She looked at Maggie, and there was no doubt what was on her mind. And finally, finally, Maggie let herself be pissed.

"I don't know why I do this. Do I pity you, or something? It can't be because I want to fuck you, because that's not happening again. You get one free ride and if you treat me like shit, that's it. But you're here  _ again _ , and I'm still putting up with you. I'd really just like to know why I'm such a fucking soft touch."

"I don't know," Ace said.

"Oh, charming, and helpful too."

"I don't know," Ace repeated, following it with a breathy rough laugh, too wry to be amused at all. "But you remind me of my niece. Always helpful, always kind, even if the object of her kindness stung her in return. The small cruelties you were guilty of as a child still weigh on you, and even in this collapsing world, where survival is at direct odds with kindness, you nevertheless struggle to behave in an honorable way."

The words hit like a blow. Even the nice things Ace said came with the weight of two worlds, one dead, one dying, and the sense that the only thing bringing her and Maggie together was the empty space they both carried, the one where family was supposed to be. Maggie would rather be laughed at for her vegan lube, blamed for her family’s abandonment, be thought cruel and selfish and heartless than have Ace, clear eyed with loss, tell her she was  _ honorable _ against all odds.

"I did not intend to treat you poorly. My censure was only for myself.”

That was no defense. “ It didn’t stop you from making it about me,” Maggie snapped. “What was it you said? ‘Your company was pleasant but  _ insignificant _ ’?”

Ace watched her, her face expressionless for a long time. “You fell asleep," she said. Maggie went still, not understanding and somehow afraid to know what she meant. Ace let her head fall back against the wall, and an oddly sad smile drew pained lines in half her face. "Your hair is so dark and smooth, but underneath, in the sweat on the back of your neck, it kinks up. You seemed . . . unburdened. And I found myself--"

Maggie's chest felt like a knot under so much strain it was ready to burst undone.

Ace shook her head and changed tacks. "There is only so much of me left. I can hardly find time to look for my sister and Kara when every part of my attention is trying to make certain the Balaknid doesn't plot against me, that Non and the other Kryptonians are not dissatisfied. I am  _ so tired _ , and yet, by choosing to stay with you, I felt  _ vrejdawg _ . Bound." 

_ Bound _ . It felt like it should be a heavy word, a hurting word, but the way Ace said it, it had felt light. A tether that lifted rather than tied down.

Ace shook her head. "Then I remembered you wouldn't understand that. I had expectations that you never intended to meet. It made me feel foolish."

Maggie swallowed the lump in her throat that made it hard to breathe. “What did you expect?” she asked. “What does a Kryptonian expect from a hookup?"

Ace's lips twitched, a small huff of laughter out of her nose. "Loyalty."

"What? Like monogamy?"

"No, not sexual fidelity. That's . . . not even--" Ace laughed, then shook her head. "Sex seals oaths. Vassalry, marriage, mentorship. Within an oathbound relationship it can happen frequently or rarely, but it doesn't happen outside of oaths. If it did--"

"It would make the oaths meaningless?"

Ace considered this, then shook her head. "That's the problem. It creates an oath where none exists, a ghost of one. I realized that I expected more of you and more of myself. The action of binding doesn’t require speech to carry it.

"Even when I engaged in sex with someone who I was not in a formal bond relationship with, it affirmed something about our relationship and the expectations inherent in it. When I was with you, our interaction was circumscribed by the act itself. You said as much. You wanted to fuck, not form a connection."

Maggie suddenly felt like an asshole.

"I hadn’t wanted it, and you didn't consent to it. It was a mistake, and it was my fault. And . . . there is not enough left of me to carry it alone."

She wasn't joking about being tired. Without her powers she couldn't even pretend to have the strength. Maggie blew out a long breath in a sigh. "Who said you'd be carrying it alone?"

Ace went still.

"You  _ asshole _ ," Maggie said, shutting her eyes, trying to soothe the sting. "Look. I don't know what kinds of oath or bonds are Kryptonian normal. But sex or no sex, I haven't been letting you show up here and walk all over me because I'm nice to everyone. Can't we just call it 'friends' and be over it?"

Ace frowned. "I don't know what 'friends' means in your culture."

"It means . . . when you need help, I'll help you. And if I need help, you help me too. And we can talk about personal things, and if we say it's a secret, we keep it." Maggie swallowed hard. She hadn't ever had a friend like that. It was a fantasy rather than a fact. "It means we keep going like we are, only you actually try not being an asshole a hundred percent of the time. But it doesn't mean you owe me anything or need to change anything about yourself, and neither do I. Is that-- is that a good enough informal bond?"

Ace nodded. "I think so." Her whole body seemed to sigh. "I'm sorry."

"What for?"

"That when I had strength to offer you something, I only took. And now that I have none, I must again ask you for help. I will not stay for long. I need not tempt more danger upon your door."

"You're all right," Maggie said, wishing that impending doom wasn't what it took to make Ace apologize.

Ace shook her head, and sad, bruised, her damp hair tied back, soaking into Maggie's t-shirt, she looked nothing more than human, in all of humanity's fragility and hopelessness.

#


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay! (Also note, if you only like the most purely vanilla sex . . . these kids are not just having that anymore.)

Maggie’s alarm woke her abruptly after a restless night on the couch. She scrabbled to shut it off, rose, and winced as her back unkinked. She ducked in to her bedroom to get her uniform and her boots. Ace was still passed out in her bed. Maggie was tying her hair up into a flipped up french braid, so it wouldn't go past her collar, when Ace blinked at her, moving like a cat into the patch of sunlight that was peeking into the window.

"You need anything before I go to work?" Maggie asked.

"Mm?" Ace squinted at her, a lazy smile inflecting one cheek. "Stay right there for a moment."

"Huh?" Maggie froze, confused.

Ace gazed at her, eyes slightly narrow, expression relaxed. Then, after about thirty seconds, she closed her eyes again. "That's good. You may go."

"Ooookay." Maggie got her a glass of water anyway, then headed out the door. What had that all been about? It kind of felt like she just wanted to look at her.

Had to be an alien thing, right? Totally an alien thing.

#

Work was garbage, as usual, but at lunch Maggie dropped by the comms room upstairs and asked about anything . . . airborne. The guy at the comms station nearest the door rolled his eyes. "You're not another supersquad member, are you?"

"What?"

"A Superman groupie. They always want to know if he's sighted near Gotham."

"Oh. No. Actually I was thinking about that crash the other day. If it's like, an alien on the run, there might be other aliens after them. What are your eyes on the sky like? Will we have advance warning if . . . a strike team comes for Gotham?"

The guy rolled his eyes again. "You'll know as soon as we will, when another building explodes and someone's granny calls it in."

"Great." Maggie forced a smile. "Love the tech we've got in this place."

"Yeah, well, if whatever billionaire who funds the bats funded the cops instead--"

"--the bosses would skim it and we'd piss it away." Maggie finished the familiar refrain. The guy laughed and Maggie left.

In theory, Maggie hated the bats. They stood against everything she believed. One person and their individual moral code should not be responsible for dealing out justice. Justice should not be secret, unavailable for questions. It was a fine line between a vigilante and a villain. A guy in a cape who thought that illegal immigrants were ruining the city could deal out untold damage in the name of justice. Maggie didn't like moral crusaders. It was all too easy imagining them going after fags like her. Some people probably thought Jack the Ripper was a fucking moral crusader, ridding the world of sin one hooker at a time. He was nothing but a sleazeball serial killer. Why hadn't the world forgotten him already?

Anyways, Maggie should have hated the bats. Her encounter with Batman himself hadn't warmed her to them. But sometimes, in the middle of another police corruption scandal, or worse, corruption with no scandal at all, she wished she was one.

Also, it would have been pretty rad to get an alert if her apartment was likely to suddenly become a war zone.

#

When Maggie got home, feet hurting, bruised from an encounter with a dude hopped up on one of the new mystery aggression drugs and the wall he threw her into, she stepped inside her apartment and froze. At some point in the long, horrible, afternoon, she'd forgotten that she'd left Ace at hers.

Her apartment was a disaster. Everything had been moved or taken out of the cupboards and laid out, piece by piece, on the table and floors. Ace was on the sofa, under a blanket, a stack of books beside her.

Oh yeah, she had a houseguest.

"So, you felt better today."

Ace peeked out from under the blanket. "All your books are about murder."

Maggie picked her way through the debris toward the kitchen and found a box of wasabi peas she hadn't remembered she had. She was exhausted enough, and now she had to put up with Ace. "I like murder."

Ace gave her an eyebrow of incredulity.

"I like fictional murder," Maggie clarified. She waved a hand. "Sometimes there are cats."

"Yes," Ace frowned at her deeply. "Are Siamese truly a second sapient species on earth who simply refuse to communicate with humans?"

Maggie repressed a grin and sat down on the couch in the space Ace cleared. She offered Ace a wasabi pea. "Not as far as we know. What else did you discover in your meticulous cataloguing of my apartment?"

"You have no organizing principle to any of it. The labeling is inconsistent and mostly inaccurate." She took a wasabi pea, put it in her mouth, and winced. Maggie laughed at her horrified face. "Everything you have to eat is  _ revolting _ ."

"I find them refreshing. Clears your sinuses and makes your eyes water."

"I'm hungry," Ace muttered.

"I'll call for takeout if you put everything away in the kitchen."

Ace looked vaguely offended and started to protest. Maggie held up a hand. "If you are going to be staying here, and you were healthy enough to get everything out, you are healthy enough to put everything back. So shoo. Clean."

Ace grumpily reorganized Maggie's cupboards and Maggie called for Thai and kept an eye on the alien's choice of organizing principle. She wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but it was probably not going to work.

"No, the broccoli has to go in the fridge. I know it begins with 'B' but my cupboards are not a stasis chamber or whatever you guys had."

Ace gave her another annoyed uncomprehending look, but obeyed the directive.

When the noodles and curry arrived, Maggie showed Ace how to use the DVD player, and let her pick out whatever she wanted to watch. This turned out to be  _ The Last Starfighter _ . Ace kept complaining about the inaccurate depiction of interstellar travel, and Maggie learned quite a lot. In return, she had to do a bit of explaining about arcade games.

It was nice. 

Different than eating alone.

After her shower, Maggie headed into the bedroom to grab her bottle of arnica and found Ace with her shirt off, inspecting the horrible bruising around her previously dislocated shoulder. Maggie instructed her to sit on the bed and applied the arnica oils to her own bruises, and then began working it into Ace's skin.

Ace made a face and winced a lot. "It's strange. And it hurts."

"It'll make your bruises heal faster. Maybe." Who knew with aliens.

There were a lot of bruises. She made Ace lie on her face and worked her way down her back, wincing at the mottled black and purple on her skin, and then shifted her shorts down to get at the ones on her ass. Ace went still. Maggie moved below her shorts, pushing them up to access the backs of her thighs, and then started stroking downward, over the insides of her knees and her calves.

"Okay, roll over, I need to see your front."

Ace rolled over, but when Maggie came back up again to inspect the bruising across her chest, she cupped the back of Maggie's head, drew her in, and kissed her.

_ Oh. _

Maggie pushed herself up, grinning down at Ace. "I'm trying to treat your bruises."

"I'm trying to treat you well," Ace half-purred.

"Oh are you? Someone's feeling better."

Ace slid her hand up Maggie's waist and under her shirt to cup her back and contemplated her with lazy eyes. "I can't break you right now. And you said I could do more things to you once my strength was under control."

"Yeah, let’s get you one more round on the bunny slope before we try any black diamonds, babe. Even if I know you'll be gentle."

"What  _ language _ are you speaking?" Ace groused, then tugged her down again and scraped her teeth over Maggie's shoulder. Maggie rubbed her cheek across Ace's, tangling her fingers in her hair.

"Don't worry," Maggie mumbled as nails scratched over her ass. "You're a quick study. You'll pick it up in no time."

#

Maggie groaned when the sun hit her. Her nice blackout curtains had been pulled back. Grouchily, she blinked into the shining sun. She'd slept naked.

Slowly, she squinted at the rest of the bed.

Ace was face down on the pillow on the other side, her feet crossing diagonally over the bed and tangling into Maggie's. She'd dropped the covers over the edge and the sun shone on her back, down to where her ass was only partially covered by the sheets. The bruises already looked better.

Maggie felt . . . fine. And that in itself was a little strange. It had been a long time since she woke up with someone and didn’t feel awkward about it.

Days stretched out in her mind, different sorts of days, where she woke up in an apartment with someone else in it. Where she was busy, because other people needed annoying things like attention and food, but it meant that those cold mornings and long stretches of silent evening time . . . wouldn't be.

With two brothers and a nearby extended family she'd never had time for herself, she'd never even had time to think, until she wasn't allowed to go home anymore. Then she thought too much.

This wasn't permanent. Ace would get better and leave, and honestly, that was fine. It was nice, waking up with someone. But it was nicest if they weren't awake yet and driving you crazy. Maggie had little doubt that the novelty would wear off quite quickly.

#

Another shit day at work, her key barely in the lock, and the door was being opened. Ace, in her jeans and one of Maggie's hoodies, scooped her up, tugging her inside and pressing her against the wall to kiss her.

She was warm and eager, unrestrained, which--at human strength--was only pleasingly rough. The weight of the day fell away and Maggie, trying to restrain her smile, kissed her back. Coming home had never felt like a reprieve before. Now it felt like stepping into a parallel universe, and when the door closed behind her all the strife of her day faded into nonexistence.

"Hey," Maggie said, when Ace put her down. "Your hearing coming back?"

"No," Ace frowned at her. "I made food and I've been thinking about you and waiting. Food then sex. Okay?"

"You made food?" That sounded suspicious.

"There are channels on your television that are entirely about food. Humans are very hedonistic."

Maggie grinned. "Says the alien who greets me with 'food then sex'."

Ace spread her hands in a half shrug. "I am learning your ways."

Against her better judgment, Maggie tried the food. She also tried not to look at the smoking disaster area on the stove. "You're going to clean that, right?"

Ace scrunched her nose. "You mean you really don't have  _ any _ cleaning robots?"

"No. It's called elbow grease."

Ace scrunched her nose again, disapproving.

Maggie wasn't sure what Ace had been watching, but she suspected it was one of those carnival food shows, because she had deep fried a nest of pasta and filled it with anything she'd found around the house. Two bites were enough to identify peas and chocolate chips and small lumps of bland flour, all doused in what seemed to be a combination of worcestershire sauce and sriracha. Maggie heated up a frozen tamale in the microwave.

Ace seemed perfectly happy with the revolting mess she'd made. "It reminds me of the street food on Thanagar."

"You better brush your teeth before you try to kiss me again. And you're cleaning up."

Maggie left her half-heartedly scrubbing pots to check her mail, delete spam messages on the answering machine, and change out of her uniform. She got into the shower and in the steady fall of hot water, didn't want to get out again. She was usually pretty brisk about it, but she was still achy from her encounter with the wall the day before.

"The oil has formed into a strange protective coating on my hands. The television did not warn me about this."

Maggie pushed open the curtain. Ace had come into the bathroom and was looking hangdog with greasy hands and a smear on her nose. "Did you try soap?"

"The soap seemed to cause the problem."

Maggie laughed and beckoned her in. "I think this is a problem you need to address with more soap."

Ace stripped off her sweatshirt, dropped her jeans, and was in the shower in moments. She stepped in, reaching for Maggie's hips. Maggie batted her hands away. "No touching me with your greasy fingers. Wash first."

More soap, hot water, and washrags eventually solved the grease issue. Ace held up her hands, showing front and back, for evaluation, like a scolded child.

"Fair," Maggie pronounced. "You may proceed."

Ace reached out, curling her hands around Maggie's cheeks, fingers catching in her hair. She leaned in.

"Ah, hold up," Maggie said, putting a hand on her sternum. "Missed a spot."

She planted the soapy washrag right in Ace's face, and Ace yelped. Maggie laughed at her protests and scrubbed at the mark on her nose. Ace grabbed her by the thighs and lifted her up, planting her back against the cold tile wall and stepping in, pressing soapy kisses to Maggie's face. Starting to slip to the side, Maggie dropped the washrag and clung to her neck. "Hey!"

Ace righted her, keeping her up, but keeping her stable.

Maggie took a skeptical look at the less than usually nearby floor. "I don't let people pick me up."

"How do they stop themselves?" Ace asked, bumping their foreheads together. "You're so small. I don't even have my powers and I can still lift you without even trying."

"Maybe they respect my dignity." Ace shifted a little, as if trying to adjust her shoulder, and Maggie rolled her eyes. “And also their current physical limitations.”

Ace's sarcastic eyebrow showed exactly what she thought of that. She leaned in again, purring against her pulsepoint, listening with her touch to the flicker of Maggie's heart. 

Maybe Maggie didn't mind being picked up, not that much at least. 

"You really like sex, don’t you?  _ Kryptonian _ ."

"It's a challenge," Ace muttered against her skin. "I don't like failing at challenges."

After they exited the shower and employed towels, Maggie clung to the sheets and Ace's hair as Ace mouthed and licked her way down to her core and demonstrated exactly what she'd been thinking about all day. Then they'd lain together, quiet, Ace reading braille on her back with her fingertips.

"I do like this," Ace admitted. "I also like how I don't feel powerless here. Outside, fearing my enemies, I feel as if I have lost an arm. But I can sense you as well with my fingertips as I could before, hear you when you are close and breathing hard, see you bare before me. It is like a screaming inside my head that I had grown accustomed to has gone silent." She scooched up slightly and lay herself on top of Maggie who squirmed, protesting, until her alien blanket tucked its face in the crook of her neck and tasted the skin there. "I also like the way you smell. And the way you taste."

Maggie sighed and let herself be crushed. It made the odd sort of emptiness she felt, remembering how Ace was only here because of loss, because of helplessness, feel more compact. It slotted in right beside the other holes left inside her, tidied up and made smaller by time. Anyway, she'd take the compliments.

"I like you too."

#

This time, when Maggie got home, bringing take-out with her in hope that she would not have to face Ace's kitchen adventures again, she was not greeted at the door. The lights in her apartment were out, and she drew her gun before stepping into the apartment.

Was Ace gone? The lack of destruction suggested that her enemies hadn’t come for her. Had she gotten better and flown off? Without saying goodbye?

The thought was far more bitter than she would have liked.

But the flickering of the TV in the room beyond called her. Ace was on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket, staring fixedly at the screen where a rodent-like creature stood tall on a rock, looking around.

"Um, hey," Maggie said, reholstering her gun.

"Shhh," Ace hissed. "Rosebud has hidden in a cave to have her pups, but her mother, the grand dame of the pack, is looking for her. If she finds her, she will kill the pups."

Maggie raised an eyebrow, dropped the takeout on the coffee table, and went to get a beer.

Ace made room for her on the couch as the credits played, and took the container of channa masala and a spoon. Maggie opened the bhangan burta and clicked the menu to see what was on next. 

"Are you watching Mongoose Manor?" Another episode was coming up. It looked like a marathon. "Have you been watching Mongoose Manor all day?"

Ace gave her a sulky look and stole the tamarind sauce. "They are noble and brave creatures."

Maggie grinned and snagged an end of the blanket. "If you say so."

Ace shoved a notebook into her lap. On it, there were pencil sketches of the critters, in postures both noble and adorable, occasionally devouring snakes and scorpions.

"They deserve to be protected," Ace said, staring straight at the TV as another episode started.

Maggie leaned back and grinned, watching her alien watch the mongeese "Yeah. They do."

#

"No Mongoose Manor today?"

Ace had tried to cook again, but today it was less of a disaster. Maggie had an early shift and had gotten off while it was still light. She’d come home to find pasta in creamed corn, which, though unusual, was edible.

"It wasn't on."

The disappointment was audible. Maggie laughed.

It had been odd, last night, crashing out in bed with Ace without sex. She wasn't used to falling asleep with someone. But once Ace had finally finished explaining the events of the first five episodes, Maggie had managed to drop off, and it had been fine.

There was no reason it should have been odd. They were friends who occasionally had sex. It wasn’t like they were in a relationship, particularly not one where they were so used to being together that it didn’t  _ matter _ if they had sex or not. (Maggie had heard about those kind of relationships. She’d never actually been in one.) But Maggie hadn’t platonically shared a bed with someone since she was on a field trip at age ten.

The state of her apartment seemed almost normal today. Then Maggie walked into her bedroom and found the entire contents of her sex toy drawer laid out on the bed in painstakingly organized rows, matched up with the few manual booklets she hadn’t lost along the way.

"Uhhh . . ."

"I'll clean it up," Ace said, rolling her eyes, annoyed.

"For once, that wasn't my question." Maggie nudged her with her elbow. "So what were  _ you _ doing all day?"

"Research."

Maggie smirked. "Really?"

Ace tipped her head to the side and gave Maggie a once over. "For someone who claims to not like penetration, you have quite a collection of implements of such."

"Back up. I have never claimed to not like penetration," Maggie retorted. "I just get bored if there's nothing else."

"The internet suggests there are photorealistic options, but you don't have any."

"Lesbian," Maggie said, pointing at herself. "Also, just not a dick fetishist. I've met lesbians who are. Anyways, I like aliens, space-age styling is a turn on."

"Why do you have so much rope?"

"Did you not encounter the word 'bondage' in your research?"

Ace's eyes went lazy and pleased. Someone had found the good porn. "Why do  _ you _ have it? Do you like getting tied up, or tying other people up?"

"Both." Maggie was pretty sure Ace would be good with knots. Being tied up, wrists to the headboard, ankles pulled apart with the rope stretched around the posts on the baseboard, Ace close and sweaty over her, learning the ins and outs--fuck puns--of her first strap on--that was a good thought.

But she also wanted to tie Ace's hands behind her back and ride her, wreck her, and not let her touch.

"Good." Ace was looking at her, fiercely, in a way that really wasn't traditionally sexy at all. But why was coy sexy? Why was sexy anything but 'lets fucking do this, okay?'? 

Maggie grinned back. "Food then sex? And clean that up. But leave out your three favorite things, okay? I've got to make today’s sad lack of mongoose entertainment up to you."

Ace swatted her ass as she went by, and Maggie grinned. She was going to get  _ fucked _ tonight, and, hell yes, she was ready.

#

"Oh yeah? You want that?" Maggie would have been embarrassed about how breathy and fake-sexy her voice came out if it wasn't the best she could do, if Ace hadn't been biting her lip and balling her fists as she pulled on the ropes attached to the headboard while Maggie left marks down her chest and over her breasts, and fuck, this would be the worst time for Ace’s powers to come back and not just because she'd break the bed in half. Maggie had her hand on her lower belly, pressing deep, she could feel how she moved inside her, deep and slow and controlling.

Now Ace was taking Maggie by the shoulders, putting her on her hands and knees, her grip hard enough to bruise. She placed her mouth on the back of Maggie's neck, rubbing her cheek against her hair, and let her fingers side down Maggie's hips, to her ass. "You're sure I can try?"

"Yeah, yeah. Just use lube, be generous, take your time, no-- no surprises, okay?"

She felt Ace smile against her shoulders. "You think I'm in a rush to get this over with?"

Maggie laughed. It came out a little strained. "No. No, I think you're a fucking sex demon, or something."

"None of this is new for you. You humans are filthy and depraved." 

Then lube slick fingers went somewhere that was always a surprise, no matter how expected it was. Maggie fell to her elbows and pressed her forehead against her forearms. 

"I like that about humans," Ace murmured, her smug grin audible in her voice.

"Fucking alien," Maggie muttered, and then moaned as the fingers spread apart to make a deeply pleasing stretch.

It felt like forever and too soon before Ace's hand was on the back of her neck, holding her down, and sliding the strap-on deep into her ass. Maggie gasped with every slow twist of Ace's hips, the short sharp strokes, the way her breath changed as her pace and intensity increased. Then Ace was groping on the bed for the bullet vibe that had played its part earlier on, flipping it on and slotting it against her clit, and oh fuck, that was a selfish move, and it didn't matter, because it sent shocks down the cock into Maggie, and Ace was gasping, grinding against her, getting ready to come and this wasn't supposed to work like this, but--fuck--fuck--fuck, her hands caught Maggie’s hip bones, dragging her in so that there was nothing between them, and it was enough for her to break.

Maggie came. Her legs collapsed.

Ace panted against her neck. The vibe switched off.

Still joined by the strap-on, they lay on sweaty sheets. "I think Kryptonians are pretty depraved too," Maggie muttered, and again felt Ace smile against her skin.

"Evidence suggests you aren't wrong."

Her arms looped around Maggie and pulled her in tight, bound her. 

Faintly, Maggie remembered that there were things she ought to be worrying about, reasons why this wasn’t supposed to feel easy. But limp and sticky and sated, Ace’s sturdy embrace was exactly what she needed, and Maggie breathed out and just  _ was _ .

#

 


	9. Chapter 9

It was good that it was her day off, Maggie thought, pressing back into the warm curve of Ace's body. She wasn't moving very quickly anywhere today. Even after a late night shower and sheets change, her lower back and hamstrings were tight, and she'd be sitting gingerly enough that all her colleagues would be asking about the rough fuck she'd had and making jokes about the size of the guy's cock. (She'd told them she was a lesbian  _ how _ many times now???)

Advil. Advil would be good.

She extracted herself from Ace's limpet-like grip and padded out into the bathroom for drugs and a glass of water and then into the kitchen only to find there was no coffee. Ugh. She headed back in and found her jeans.

"Work, again?" Ace mumbled from the bed.

"Not today. I just need coffee." Maggie cocked her head. "Want to go out for breakfast? You haven't been out of the apartment in days. You're not stir crazy?"

Ace frowned at her. "Do you mean is it boring in here? Because yes. It's boring."

Maggie nodded and stripped off her sleep shirt to rummage for a bra. "Let's go out. I doubt you're in any more danger of being found in the city than in my place, yeah?" To be honest, Maggie was starting to suspect that Ace had gotten away clean and no one would come looking for her at all. (What that meant for Maggie, if Ace’s powers didn’t come back either, she wasn’t really ready to think about.)

Ace shrugged and started getting dressed. It was cold, so Maggie put her in one of her extra jackets and pulled a beanie down over her ears.

They headed out into one of Gotham’s rare sunny mornings. Ace seemed hesitant at first, scanning the area like she was going to get jumped. But nothing much was happening on the street or in the sky. They headed down the corner to the bodega and Maggie tugged Ace inside to the coffee stand.

"It's not fucking yuppie espresso," she explained. "But it's good, and I harassed them into getting organic fairtrade and now the people from the gentrified block up the street think it's a 'find'." Maggie rolled her eyes, and Ace made a face as if she was only following half of that. Maggie poured out two cups, and went to stick five bucks in the jar.

"Magita!" called out Jorje, the tiny old man who ran the place. "You want milk?” he asked in Spanish. “We keep running out of that fake nut milk you like because of the  _ fresas,  _ but we have some in now."

Maggie grinned. "Nah, I'm good with black." She looked up at Ace and continued in English. "You want almond milk or creamer or something?"

Ace frowned into the blackish liquid and shook her head.

"Is that your girl?"

Maggie froze.

"Uh, this is Ace," she pushed Ace a little forward, forgetting she was speaking Spanish. "She's a friend."

"Early morning for a friend." Jorje grinned toothily at Ace. "Good to meet you."

Ace dipped her head. "Good to meet you too." The words came out in clear Spanish with a slight Chilango burr. Maggie stared at her.

Jorje's grin grew even wider. "Excellent. Excellent. Ah! Churros! They're fresh. You have them."

With a sack of churros they were pushed back out into the nice day.

"I didn't know you spoke Spanish," Maggie hissed at Ace.

Ace shrugged, grimaced at the taste of the coffee, and reached for the churros, which Maggie pulled away. "It's just greetings. They're all the same. You hear them all over and you repeat it. Content is harder."

Maggie gave her a suspicious look. "Is that one of your superpowers?"

Ace bobbed her head noncommittally. "Hearing everything all the time might help."

"And you keep whining about not understanding me."

"You--" Ace shoved her shoulder. "--you're impossible. It's like you try to say everything in the most confusing way you can."

"It's an art."

They made their way through the city to the river. Maggie allowed Ace a churro and then smacked her hands when she tried to steal the whole bag. Maggie swung up onto the bridge railing to sit and drink her coffee. Ace moved in behind her and wrapped her arms around her waist. "Don't fall in. My flying is somewhat inaccessible currently."

Maggie leaned back against her shoulder and drank her coffee. The sun rose higher in the sky, peeking up over the buildings and sending the sludgy polluted river sparkling. 

It felt like the world might not be so bad after all.

Ace did end up eating all the churros.

It was too nice to go back inside, so Maggie dragged Ace on her errands. Laundry and drycleaner and ammo shop and back to the bodega for a pound of coffee and boot polish. They passed Mrs. Rivera, Maggie’s downstairs neighbor, on her way back from the laundromat, and it wasn't like Maggie could let her carry that giant stack of laundry alone. 

Ace, pleasant as always, told Maggie the stack looked like it was going to smother her, and stole the top of the pile. She also continued to be irritatingly competent at Spanish and made herself agreeable to Mrs. Rivera in a way she never made herself agreeable to  _ anyone _ . Maggie was left offended and gaping as Mrs. Rivera gave Maggie a pat on the shoulder and a knowing smile when she left. Ace was  _ not _ her girlfriend, and it was incredibly frustrating to know that everyone she knew--well, Jorje and Mrs. Rivera at least--was waiting for her to stop hooking up and settle down already.

Even the too friendly dude at the drugstore gave Ace a double-take and then grinned as she put her arm around Maggie's shoulders while Maggie was digging for her wallet.

Honestly, Maggie would have been relieved by some traditional homophobia around now.

At lunch at the one Vietnamese restaurant in a mile radius that had more than two interesting vegetarian dishes, the grumpy teen girl who always took her table was even grumpier than usual. Ace, irritating as always, made a show of holding hands across the table and making flirty gestures and expressions, and sneaking things off her plate (honestly, that part probably wasn't related, she just had no sense that Maggie's plate was off limits to her)--as if she thought the kid had a crush on Maggie or something and wanted to make her feel worse.

She didn't.

Obviously.

No one had a  _ crush _ on Maggie.

Ace tucked her hand in Maggie’s back pocket when they left, and then wouldn't take it out. 

They ended up in Jackson Park, Maggie rambling about how--before she’d joined the force--the eco-terrorist Dr. Pamela Isley had turned all of the plants into maneaters temporarily, and the very lush green area over beyond the pond was so green because it had eaten half the rookies on the force that year. Because of that, it was the nicest part in the city.

On an overlook above the pond, sad and churned up with iron railings around it, Ace stood behind her, looking out at the park and the city skyline beyond. Looking up, Maggie thought, at the empty grey Gotham sky.

“Devoured by a plant isn’t how I want to go,” Maggie said, absently, her attention lingering on the warm grip at her waist, on the alien, whose origins felt far less strange than the familiarity of her touch. “But on the whole, GCPD rookies are probably worth more as nitrogen than as officers.”

Was this what it felt like to have a girlfriend? A little awkwardness, eagerness to please, and a sense of calmness. On a date, she was always sure that something would go horribly wrong and she’d be abandoned or have to make her excuses and run. But here--Ace knew her. She didn’t have to try not to be herself. Maggie had nothing more to say, so she said nothing, leaning into Ace’s side, their breathing even. 

It was a moment.

"I want to leave this planet," Ace said.

Maggie did her best not to react.

"If my family isn't here, there's no reason for me to stay. My enemies are appalling, and I can't bear most of my allies. Any planet would be better than this one. It's not  _ mine _ . Why would I live out my days on a planet that is dying, one where the people  _ know _ it is dying, and still fail to act?"

_ Mine _ . Ace’s voice was rough, but the pain in it wasn’t for Earth. Maggie swallowed a lump in her throat. Being two people facing the collapse of their world was something that they’d had in common, but Ace’s world was already gone. Nothing bound her to Earth, and all she carried for Krypton was regret. Did Ace wish that if she had to fail to save it, she could have died there? "You'd have stayed on Krypton."

"Of course."

Maggie turned her back to the railing and looked up at her. "I'd go. Fuck this place. If I had a way to live on a different planet, I'd ditch this world in a second."

Ace cocked her head and watched her closely, not stepping away or giving her space. "Would you?" she asked softly. "If there was a chance you could fix things?"

Her eyes stayed steady and there was a resigned sort of confidence there, as if she knew what Maggie was, as if she had no doubt of her.

Maggie shut her eyes and leaned forward, burying her face into Ace's sweatshirt. Ace's grip wrapped around her, and it almost felt like she didn't want to be saying goodbye.

#

It was always going to be temporary. Ace wanted to find her family. Once Maggie found them, or, profoundly didn’t, things would have to change. (Maggie was really starting to doubt she’d be able to find them at all. Her attempts to locate  _ any  _ Kryptonian refugees had been unsuccessful. That mean they weren’t in contact with any of the other alien communities on Earth, and Maggie lacked the time and resources to go through every local paper for rumors of strange events that might be caused by people with powers. Additionally, if they were that well hidden, it suggested there weren’t very many, which made the odds of it being Ace’s family the ones who’d made it here even lower.) 

At the very least, once Ace knew for sure her family wasn’t on Earth, she’d leave to hunt for them on other planets Kryptonians might have fled to. Maggie knew that. On some level, she’d always known that.

It just hurt to have it said aloud And it hurt worse on a day like today, where stupid, impossible things had almost seemed true. 

#

On the way back to Maggie’s apartment, because Maggie really couldn't catch a break, they got explosions.

Purple and green smoke was puffing up out of PS 92, just down the block. Fire alarms were blaring; kids were screaming.

Maggie took off running. Ace startled, then was at her side instantly, a foot off the ground. Ace looked at her feet, then at Maggie. Maggie looked at her feet, then swore. "Go. You can get there before me.  _ Go _ ."

Ace did. She hit the top floor just as another bomb was going off, caught it full in the gut, and carried it off and away. Then she was back, grasping children like baby cats by their hoodies and backpacks and dropping them down onto the grass in the park.

Maggie hit the door and swore. Lockdown had shut it. The kids couldn't get out. She smashed the lock, jerked the door open, and started shouting, directing kids and panicking teachers toward the park also.

With horrible laughing sound effects, more fires began. When the first wave of students had gone, Maggie held her cap over her face and ran in, banging through closets and bathrooms to clear them of hiding students. Ace grabbed her on the third floor and flew her--fighting the whole way--out of the building and dropped her on the street.

"It's clear, they're all out," Ace snapped. 

Maggie, doubled over coughing, found this unnecessarily stern.

The fire department was here now, the cops just arriving. They'd have questions. "We should go," Maggie wheezed.

Ace caught her up around the waist and they were off again, so fast Maggie felt her skin burn with wind. They landed in a small abandoned lot, fenced in and blocked off from view by other blind buildings. Shit, flying was insane.

Ace was glaring. Maggie finally caught her breath, her chest feeling like the air was forcing its way through a cheesegrater. She finally relaxed enough to sigh. "Well, that sucked."

"You could have  _ died _ ," Ace snapped. "You are a flimsy, puny human, and you went  _ into _ the burning and exploding building."

"Up until about half an hour ago you were as flimsy and puny as me, and you would have done it too!"

"I don't  _ care _ about humans."

"Give it up! I’ve heard it. We're worthless, we've ruined our world, we're parasitic garbage, I know all that. You'd leave us to our own devices, because it's not your problem. Fine. But as if you could walk away when you see kids dying."

Ace's expression hardened. "I know what I did." 

At least someone could admit her own contradictions. The unsaid half of the utterance echoed quietly in the abandoned lot.  _ I know what I have to do. _

_ I don’t care about humans, but I’ll save them. I care about you, but I have to let you go. _

Maggie heaved for clear air, coughed and rubbed her eyes, smearing soot onto her hand. Why was she yelling?

She knew why she was yelling. Her shoulders sagged along with her spirits. "You're going to go back now, I guess."

Ace looked at her hands. "My abilities returned."

"I guessed they probably would."

Ace sighed. "I suppose I must go back and see if any who stayed loyal to me require saving."

"You're the boss," Maggie said, feeling so tired. She'd known that, but she hadn't really wanted to think about it.

Ace nodded.

Maggie curled her reaching hands into fists as if that would make her strong enough to hold herself up. "Well, what the fuck are you doing, hanging around here?"

Ace's face was different with her powers than without them. Her eyes were vacant, her expression distant, as if she was listening to things happening far away. It made Maggie feel like she was hardly present at all.

Then, she flickered--here for a moment, then gone, then back. She pressed something into Maggie's hand. "If you are in mortal peril, you may summon me."

Maggie looked at the disc. "What is it?"

"A beacon." Ace frowned. "Use it only at your own discretion. Also preferably sooner if the peril is large. I am wary of being called into traps these days. I will not rush blindly to your rescue."

"I suppose I can't use it for booty calls then?" Maggie asked, her mouth speaking without her consent.

Ace snorted, and a half grin made her look more like she had the past week. "Maybe we can work out a code." Her eyes went distant again. "I must go."

Maggie nodded. "Be safe."

Ace turned her whole focus on Maggie, the grin still there. "You are a noble and brave creature, Maggie-Sawyer. Much like a mongoose."

And then, leaving Maggie spitting in surprise and annoyance, she was gone, a sonic boom the only thing that tracked her wake.

"Fucking mongeese," Maggie muttered. She worked her way around the vacant lot, figured out that it was padlocked and chained and there was no simple means of exit. "Goddammit," she swore, and started climbing the fence.

#


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading this. I've really appreciated all of the comments, and am glad that my weird innertube of a ship has gotten some love.
> 
> Extra thanks to Satan and co., and extra special super awesome thanks to queersintherain who was a brilliant beta. (All remaining mistakes and confusions are my own.)

A few weeks later Superman showed up at Maggie’s door.

Maggie hadn't seen Ace since Ace abandoned her in a vacant lot, but she hadn't been in mortal peril either, so she figured it had been an okay couple of weeks. But then . . . Superman.

He looked awkward and concerned, standing in her apartment hallway in his supersuit, and Maggie sighed. "You might as well come in."

He bumbled around the living room, clearly uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like Maggie was going to offer him tea. She didn’t know why he was here. But she could guess it had something to do with whatever she’d said to the Batman. 

It had to do with Ace.

She waited. Eventually he got to the point.

"I have been informed that you participated in clearing a building that was targeted by the Joker."

Maggie tipped her head. If that was what this was about, it had taken him long enough to get over here. So much for the superhero fast response squad. "And why would you believe that?"

"Um," Superman hesitated. "We have sources."

"In Gotham? That you believe?"

"Our eyes in the city are technological."

"Okay." Maggie nodded. She'd figured the Bats had better tech than the GCPD. Nice to have it confirmed.

Superman frowned at her. "Can you please stop trying to finagle information out of me? I am trying to warn you."

"About what?" Maggie asked. Her tone came out flat. She didn't like Superman. It wasn't his fault, really. He was probably doing his best. But still, he pissed her off. Heroes pissed her off. Sometimes they stepped up and dealt with a bigger threat than what people could handle on their own, but more often than not they attracted it. They were like a red flag waving at a bull. What better way to prove yourself than by taking down a hero? And even with all their powers and cleverness, they couldn’t fix the real issues, the ones that didn’t have a face you could punch. One person couldn’t sort out the social inequality that led to crime, and one person couldn’t save the planet from atmospheric pollutants leading to global warming. But having a hero made everyone hope that it would just turn out okay, when it wouldn’t. It already wasn’t okay. Every day, so many things were lost.

"Oracle has identified you as associating with the known criminal, General Astra In-Ze."

And there it was. Maggie filed away names and ranks. She had seen the ghosts of them, the shadows, but now they were filled in. She was only a little sorry that she was hearing them from him. Ace would have told her, if she’d asked. Maggie believed that.

Mostly.

"Hon," Maggie said. " _ You're _ a known criminal. Costumed vigilantism isn't legal. I know. I'm a cop."

Superman made a bunch of faces. "You can call me Kal."

"I'd rather not," Maggie said. Was ‘Hon’ really the part that bothered him most about that sentence? "Look. I didn't see the case files, and I know Ace isn't warm and fuzzy, but I’m going to contest your use of ‘known criminal.’ I kind of feel that whatever you do to try to save a world that ends up dying anyway isn't really a hot pursuit sort of offense. Mainly because the pursuers are all dead. You’re out of jurisdiction. She isn’t a criminal here."

"Trying to save the world?” Kal’s broad farmboy forehead furrowed with a confusion that seemed too naive to credit. “That wasn't the story in the crystals."

Maggie sighed. She didn’t know what the crystals said, but she knew enough to be able to guess that whatever crazy stupid thing Ace had done, it had been an act of desperation. It might have been wildly criminal and it wasn’t like anyone with the title ‘General’ was a stranger to violence. But there was no way the records were accurate if they ignored the fact that Ace’s motives were to save her planet from blowing up. That sounded like politics to her. "Again--” She pointed to her chest. "--I’m a cop. When you arrest someone because they got in your face and pointed out your hypocrisy, it's not all that hard to make it sound like you had good reason to. When you arrest someone because the city bosses tell you to, you make it look real good. Even if the perp did something clearly and obviously illegal, you still spin it in your report, make him sound like the worst of the worst, make yourself sound good. It’s cop nature, and I don’t think Kryptonian cops were all that different. If you trust a statement like that, without question, you're a sucker."

Kal’s mouth was pinched, he looked red-faced and insulted. Maybe he did know what she was saying. Maybe he knew better than to trust a cop--particularly a Gotham cop--but he hadn’t thought it applied to his tragic lost home. Nowhere was perfect, Maggie knew. And just because a planet had died tragically, it didn’t mean they were all good guys.

But not being good guys didn’t mean they deserved to die like that either.

"And if you trust a criminal's word without question?" Kal asked, his tone arch. It made him sound more like Ace than he ever had.

"I trust her grief," Maggie said. "And how pissed off she was. I know what injustice tastes like, and I know what loss looks like. So I made a judgment call. I decided associating with a ‘known criminal’ was worth the risk.” Maggie gave a short, rough shrug. “And I’ve associated with her enough to feel like I wasn't wrong. She has no grand nefarious plans. She just wants to find her family, okay?"

"You mean her sister, the one who sent her to prison? How can you be sure she isn't out for revenge?"

"I  _ can't _ ," Maggie snapped. How dare this upstart think he knew Ace better than she did? "I can't be sure of anyone. I can't be sure that you're not playing a long con to become ruler of Earth. Sometimes I trust people, okay? And sometimes it backfires, but I try and make sure it backfires on  _ me _ . Yeah, she's angry about what her sister did. But that isn’t all she is. She tells stories about them as kids and smiles; she’s bitter and sullen when she thinks about how it ended between them; she thought about killing me when I talked shit about her. She misses her sister. She misses her niece too. She fucked up and didn't save the world when she wanted to and she carries that, okay?"

Kal hung his head. "Her sister didn't leave Krypton."

"What?"

"She chose to stay."

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. That was all that was in Maggie's head, the sear of it, the rage, that he knew, he  _ knew _ there was no chance of Ace getting her sister back, and he hadn't even considered telling her and giving her peace.

"But her niece is here. She landed about four years ago."

Maggie choked. "Kara? Kara is here?"

Kal nodded, an oddly sympathetic smile on his face. "She's with a good family. She's settling in well. Do you think Astra would try to take her away? Make her live with the other prisoners, or--" His mouth twisted as if he was trying to think of something worse but couldn’t imagine it.

What would Ace do if she had her niece back? Maggie's eyes stung. Not take her back to their camp, that was for certain. She hated it there. But spiriting her off planet, running back to the stars, to start over somewhere else, on a better planet, on one that wasn't broken and dying, that was much more likely.

"I don't know," Maggie said. "But I know she wouldn't hurt her."

Kal contemplated her for a long time. "I'll give you the address," he said.

"What?"

"I don't know what’s the right thing to do. You're closer to the situation. You can see it more clearly. So I'll tell you, and you can decide whether or not it's the right thing to tell Astra."

Maggie rubbed her forehead. "How do I--"

"Just make sure Kara's safe. Okay?" Kal made a sad little smile. "She's my cousin. I want her to be safe."

Maggie stared at Superman. That was an admission he hadn't needed to make. But it slotted a lot of things into place that hadn’t made sense before. Ace’s animosity toward him, his investment in the situation--it was personal. It made his trust worth more. She nodded.

#

Kal was wrong, that being closer meant she could see the situation more clearly. He didn't know just how embroiled she'd gotten in this mess. Ace wanted to find her family so badly, but telling her that her sister was dead, telling her that her niece  _ wasn’t _ , it felt overwhelming. To bear that message of both grief and hope, witness Ace’s reaction--her own feelings were too tangled up to be able to see at all.

The conflict wasn’t about the choice. Keeping this information from Ace wasn’t an option. But still the voice in her head kept pounding--not yet, not yet.

She had the information that Ace desperately wanted to know, she had the beacon to summon her with, and she couldn't press it.

Maybe she was being selfish, holding onto hope when there was none. This was the end. Ace had come to her with a question, and Maggie had found the answer. Maggie would tell her. Then she would go.

A couple days after Superman had come, Maggie opened her mailbox to find a square red card. 

Her hand shook as she tore open the envelope. 

_ Happy Holidays _ , was written inside underneath a picture of a cardinal in the snow. Maggie bit back a laugh. Her dad had always ranted that her aunt only sent secular Christmas cards. Living there had taught her that her aunt had bought them once by accident when the store was out of other options, but she’d kept buying them just to spite him.

Was that it? Her eyes stung. She turned it over. 

On the back was a small note. “I have email now.  [ guadalupe.flores@optonline.com ](mailto:guadalupe.flores@optonline.com) ”

Maggie heard the words in her aunt’s brusque tone. She didn’t make it back up the stairs to her apartment. She fell back against the wall and sank to the dirty floor.

Was this how it felt to know you hadn’t been forgotten?

#

That night she pressed the beacon.

Ace showed up, scowling, grumpy and a little scuffed. "You're fine? You called me and you're fine? I'm a little busy right now."

Maggie took a deep breath. "Yeah. I-- I know where Kara is."

For a moment, Ace didn't seem to understand. Her brow furrowed, her mouth turned down at the corners, and then Maggie saw it hit. It hit like a fucking steamshovel, and it gutted her. Every struck raw nerve was visible on her face.

"Alura?"

Maggie shook her head. She shook it again, the words not coming. She swallowed, and managed to speak. "She didn't leave Krypton."

Ace was still for one long frozen moment. And then, like a blink of an eye, she was gone.

#

Maggie made herself a mug of tea. It had just finished steeping when Ace returned. She was covered in blood.

It wasn't her blood.

"I dealt with them. I'd had enough of trying to bargain. I don't want Kara to live in a universe with them in it." The words tumbled out on top of each other, too fast, chaotic.

"Ace--"

Ace pinned her with a glare, crossing her arms, her mouth quirking down. "How did you find out about Kara?"

"Kal. Superman."

Ace’s lip curled. Her eyes went sharp, suspicious. "You know my name, don't you? You know a lot about me."

Maggie nodded, not looking away. "You asked me to call you Ace."

“What else did he tell you?”

Did she mean about Ace’s crimes? About the prison she’d been relegated to? About the other people whose blood she might be drenched in? Maggie bit her lip, and then breathed out. “He says she's happy."

Silence hung in the room. 

Slowly, Ace looked down at herself, and then, as if suddenly her powers were gone again, she seemed to go weak, sliding into a chair, pressing her hands together over her mouth. "He told you . . . knowing you would tell me?"

She sounded like she didn’t believe it. If Kara was happy, why tell her murderous aunt where to find her? Why did she deserve to know anything at all?

"I told him that you weren't going to hurt her. The last thing you would do is hurt her,” Maggie said, her voice coming out scratchy and soft. She stared at her own hands. 

She could feel Ace’s eyes on her, feel-- _ something _ . She didn’t know what.

Then Ace spoke. "I want to see her."

Maggie nodded. She glanced up. Ace’s face was still too raw to look at. She nodded again, turning her eyes away.

"Will you take me there?"

Maggie straightened, surprised. "You want me to come with you?"

Ace, arms still crossed, shrugged and looked away. "I suppose I could learn to manage the human address systems without too much effort."

But her guarded gaze, her tenseness betrayed the wryness as a lie. Maggie got it. She wouldn't want to be alone for this either.

"Okay. I'll come."

#

The address was in California. One of Maggie's colleagues happened to be transferring to the NCPD and wouldn’t shut up about it because was so thrilled. He was also freaking out about how to get his car across the country. Maggie offered to drive it.

Ace left to sort out her business back at her 'refugee camp' and said she would meet Maggie when she left the city. Maggie got a week off by promising her Captain that she wasn't fleeing the city for good and would come back in two weeks to start CI training.

She took the car, loaded it up, put in the first of her driving CDs, and made her way out of Gotham. She was just outside Bloodhaven when she spotted a familiar figure standing on the edge of a gas station parking lot. She pulled in. Ace was wearing the clothes she’d cleared out the school in, including the jacket Maggie had lent her, smoke-stained with scorch marks across the front. Maggie rolled down her window.

"Where ya heading?"

Ace leaned on the car roof to look in at her. Her smile was lazy and secretive, and she felt both like someone familiar and someone new and strange. "Somewhere else."

#

Ace pushed the passenger seat all the way back and stretched out, long and casually graceful. She leaned out the window even when they were going 90, farther than would be safe for anyone else. She scrunched her nose at the music, watched Maggie drive and asked to try--that was  _ not _ going to happen. She put on Maggie's extra sunglasses and leaned back in her seat, and said, "I could have flown us there in six hours."

"I would have literally frozen to death. Anyways, following the map would have been fun from thirty-thousand feet."

Ace shrugged. Though her gaze was obscured by the glasses, the slight tilt to her head and the slight smirk on the corner of her lips suggested to Maggie that she was being watched.

Maggie liked driving. It was meditative. She used to take her aunt's truck out in Nebraska and just drive, always moving so no one would catch her. Ace didn't talk much, and that was nice too. No effort required, but she wasn't alone.

Highways were not the showpiece of America, but sometimes they were amazing. Even in March, when the trees were bare save for grey-green scraggly buds, driving through the Delaware water gap, heading out over the Pennsylvania ridges, the towns drew away into the distance, the highways cutting through seemingly untracked wilderness, passing through a wild world of cliffs and old woods and wide rushing rivers that could still make a human feel small.

Maggie started to yawn as they hit Ohio and the sun was going down. Even Ace drooped as the light turned pale on her skin. Maggie pulled into the first motel that looked like not a shithole and got a room.

As Maggie fumbled with the key, Ace stepped in behind her and slid her arm around Maggie's shoulders, pressing warm and present against her back, nosing lightly at her hair.

Her breath caught in her chest, and Maggie shut her eyes. This wasn’t what she was here for. Ace was leaving. She’d accepted that. 

She’d accepted that this would end. It didn’t mean she couldn’t have it now. 

Maggie leaned back and lifted her head, turning to press her lips against Ace’s jawline. Ace’s arms wrapped around her, bundling her up in her unbreakable grip, acknowledging the acceptance with a mark of possession, almost as if she was saying ‘ _ mine.’ _

When the door came open, Maggie didn't get more than one step into the room before she was being turned and lifted up, Ace's hands under her thighs, hoisting her high. In a step or a swoop, her back hit the bed. 

“I like you in sunglasses,” Ace murmured. “You were sweaty in the car. I could smell it on your skin.”

Maggie’s fingers traced along Ace’s forehead, tangling in the shorter hair near her ear, as she catalogued the ways it felt different to be with Ace at full power. “You’re a weird perv.”

Ace smirked. “I think the English saying is, ‘takes one to know one.’” Her hand had been creeping up Maggie’s back, tracing ticklish patterns down the hollow of her spine. Her thumb found a pressure point.

Maggie gasped, the air garbling her next words. “Seems accurate.” 

Ace leaned in to kiss her, nipping a little, her eyes hazy as if she was shuttering off all her senses to pay attention to only Maggie. Maggie lifted her head to kiss her back, listening to Ace’s pleased hum, sensing the way the grip on her hip tightened without ever going too hard. 

Maggie had never smiled so much while kissing someone, never felt like there was sunshine seeping through her pores. But this, it was special in a way she couldn’t quite fit words around.

Nothing external seemed to matter when Ace was kissing her, stripping off her shirt and tying her hands behind her back with it, making her laugh while Maggie straddled her lap. In an unexpected way, sex in these strange beds in shitty motel rooms, in those myriad liminal spaces that they passed through felt free.

Maybe it was the fact that it was a road trip and road trips were never anything more than the space between here and there. Maybe it was because there was a rhythm to this kind of life, like a heartbeat.

Ace had never been a real part of her life. She was extra. Bonus alien sex. Bonus kind-of-friend. Bonus someone to hold her on unexpectedly shitty nights. It would hurt to say goodbye, but it had hurt all the times before, and it hadn’t broken her. Maggie wasn’t going to break when this was over. There was no reason to be afraid. They still had a little time.

#

The day before they were set to reach Midvale, they stopped at a nicer hotel, and Maggie, whose back had seized up from six days of driving, opened the faucets to run a bath.

Ace gave her a sharp look, but stripped off and slid in behind her. 

Maggie didn't remember what she'd said about bathing being for family until Ace's arms were around her and her legs framing her like a cage. She leaned back into Ace's chest and didn't worry about it. Gently Ace ran her finger down Maggie's cheek and drew her hair, strand by strand, behind her ear.

They stayed in until the water grew cold.

After, when Ace fucked her, nose to nose, strange grey eyes penetrating, it felt almost like a recording, like whatever happened, she’d remember this.

Maggie did her best to give her something worth remembering.

#

They reached the house mid-afternoon on the seventh day. It was almost a stake out, their car parked half a block down and across the street, a good enough line of sight to see anyone coming in or out. It was a nice house, just off the beach, the kind of pristine upper middle class that Maggie had always found vaguely offensive. Ace's mouth was taut, her gaze focused, and Maggie wondered what she could see inside the house. Was Kara there?

A taxi drove up, stopping in front, and a girl got out, young, maybe just college age. She was skinny, with long brown hair in a braid down her back, and her backpack was over-achiever heavy.

She was paying when the door of the house burst open.

"Alex! You're home! I've been  _ waiting _ !" A ball of sunshine bolted out the door and threw her arms around the girl. The girl swayed at the force of the assault, but she turned into it, and returned the hug fiercely.

"I'm never going to surprise you, am I?"

"Of course not." The blonde girl tapped 'Alex's' chest. "I can hear this miles away."

Maggie stared now. The blonde was her, Kara. She wasn’t the kid that Ace talked about. She’d grown up. She was tall like Ace, but her hair was honey-colored, and she was softer featured. She smiled with a freedom that must have been hard won.

The other girl watched her like she made her heart swell up. Kara started in on a story, something about JC and art classes, and she took Alex's huge backpack like it was nothing, and they headed back up to the house, shoulders bumping, Alex laughing in the right places in her stories. They paused on the porch, Kara stepping in for another hug, and Alex seeming to do her best to crush the bulletproof girl.

"I'm so glad you're back."

"I missed you too."

And then they stepped inside and Maggie breathed out. She looked over at Ace, still watching, her expression still and tired.

"You going to go say hi?"

A long moment of quiet with no response. Finally Ace shook her head. "She's happy. She's loved. That's all I wanted to know."

But she's  _ here _ , Maggie didn't say. She's in this broken, beat up, dying world. Are you going to leave her here?

Are you going to change your mind and stay?

Ace got out of the car and gestured for Maggie to follow. Unsure of what this was about, Maggie locked the car and followed Ace up, over the dune, to where they could see the ocean. She stood there, staring at it, the wind in her hair and making her jacket flare open.

"Krypton didn't have oceans," Ace said.

It looked like she was trying not to cry.

Maggie didn’t know what was going on in her head-- _ I can’t hurt her, I don’t deserve her _ \--and shoved down her own anger-- _ she’d want to know you’re okay. She’d want to know  _ some  _ part of her family was okay _ . She stood there, turned into the salt wind, letting Ace gather herself.

When the sniffling had stopped and it seemed safe, Maggie nudged her with her elbow.

"Come on, shoes off, roll up your pants."

Ace blinked at her, confused.

"We're at the  _ beach _ ." And Krypton didn’t have oceans.

It was a chilly day with a high wind, but that was no reason not to splash in the surf. Eventually, Maggie collapsed onto the sand, and Ace settled in behind her, wrapping her up, and making small annoyed sounds as she tried and failed to brush sand off her feet.

Maggie shut her eyes and rested her head on Ace's shoulder. They stayed there a long time as the waves crashed against the sand.

When they got back to the motel that night, Ace touched her differently. It felt quiet and meditative, like 'thank you for giving me this,' like 'I'll miss you.'

It felt like the last time.

Ace left the next morning, waiting to walk down to the parking lot with Maggie to fly away. When she was no more than a spec in the sky, Maggie put on her sunglasses and started the final three hour trip down to National City to drop off the car.

She got a flight back, got back to her apartment, got back to work. CI training was a snap. She was on the road to becoming a detective faster than any of the others in her rookie cohort. She emailed her aunt, and got her recipe for sage and butter beans.

She didn't expect to see Ace again.

It didn’t break her. She was fine. 

#

At the end of May, Maggie, twenty-four but feeling like she was fourteen again, her dad shouting 'get out!' at her, found out she was pregnant.

. . .

###


	11. Not A Chapter

Impossible Moodboard:

 

Stay tuned for Volume 2! (Eventually, I hope)


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